Related papers: Matter and Interactions: a particle physics perspe…
Understanding of light-matter interaction is a keystone in mastering classical and quantum optics. This paper gives an overview of the fundamental principles used in these two fields for description of light-matter interaction. By exploring…
Elementary particle physics is gradually implemented into science curricula at high school level. However, common presentations on educational, semi-technical or popular level contain or support severe misconceptions. We discuss in…
The job of a physicist is to describe Nature. General features, hypotheses and theories help to describe physics phenomena at a more abstract, fundamental level, and are sometimes tacitly assigned some sort of real existence; doing so…
Matter has two physical properties: Inertia and interaction. If we define the center of mass of an elementary particle in relation to its inertia, and a center of interaction in relation to its interactive properties, there are only two…
Magnetic fields are everywhere in the Universe and in our everyday life and many processes are affected by their presence, generating a rich phenomenology that depends also on other possible external agents. We review here some results,…
The reader surely knows what particles physics is about: finding building blocks of nature that appear elementary at a given time and study their interactions - so why in the world this essay? The problem is how to arrive at a fundamental…
Classical theory asserts that several electromagnetic waves cannot interact with matter if they interfere destructively to zero, whereas quantum mechanics predicts a nontrivial light-matter dynamics even when the average electric field…
Since the particles such as molecules, atoms and nuclei are composite particles, it is important to recognize that physics must be invariant for the composite particles and their constituent particles, this requirement is called particle…
There is debate as to whether quantum field theory is, at bottom, a quantum theory of fields or particles. One can take a field approach to the theory, using wave functionals over field configurations, or a particle approach, using wave…
Quantum foundations are still unsettled, with mixed effects on science and society. By now it should be possible to obtain consensus on at least one issue: Are the fundamental constituents fields or particles? As this paper shows,…
A goal of physics is to understand the greatest possible breadth of natural phenomena in terms of the most economical set of basic concepts. However, as the understanding of physics has developed historically, its pedagogy and language have…
Using the example of classical electrodynamics, I argue that the concept of fields as mediators of particle interactions is fundamentally flawed and reflects a misguided attempt to retrieve Newtonian concepts in relativistic theories. This…
We construct contact interactions for bosonic and fermionic point particles. We first relate the resulting theories to classical electrostatics by taking functional averages over worldlines whose endpoints are fixed to charged particles.…
In this article the current understanding of fundamental particles and their interactions is presented for the interested non-specialist, by adopting a semi-historical path. A discussion on the unresolved problems is also presented.
Modern theories of fundamental interactions describe strong, electromagnetic and weak interactions as quantum field theories with certain kinds of embedded internal symmetries called `gauge symmetries'. This article introduces quantum field…
The Standard Model of the electroweak and strong interactions of particle physics is a quantum field theory. Elementary particles are not indivisible `pieces' of matter but energy bundles of fields, whose properties and interactions are a…
Mass is an important concept in classical mechanics, which regards a particle as a corpuscular object. But according to wave-particle duality, we know a free particle can behave like a wave. Is there a wave property that corresponds to the…
Here I explore a novel no-collapse interpretation of quantum mechanics which combines aspects of two familiar and well-developed alternatives, Bohmian mechanics and the many-worlds interpretation. Despite reproducing the empirical…
This lecture reviews the principles of particle-matter interactions, providing the essential physics background required to understand beam loss mechanisms in high-energy accelerators and their associated implications. The main interaction…
We set out a fundamental ontology of atomism in terms of matter points. While being most parsimonious, this ontology is able to match both classical and quantum mechanics, and it remains a viable option for any future theory of cosmology…