What is the best introduction to representations of elementary particles?

[Alamino]

Does anyone know of any and can comment a good introduction to representaions of elementary particles?

 

[selfAdjoint]

Do you mean group representaions? There's a Dover book by Hammermesh, "Group Theory and its Application to Physical Problems" that takes you through the calculation of the representations.

 

[rick1138]

Another title is Howard Georgi's Lie Algebras in Particle Physics. Neither of these books are a quick read, but they are the best intros available.

 

[rick1138]

I just found some great notes on the subject here:

http://www.itp.uni-hannover.de/~flohr/lectures/

Go to the Physical Applications of Group Theory section and download the documents available. Everything is in English.

 

[selfAdjoint]

Boy are those good notes! I've printed them off, and they're going into a binder for reference. He explains! Tells you why the group multiplication is less useful than conjugation. I've known about those for 50 years and never saw that before.

 

[Alamino]

Yes, great notes! I gave a look at Georgi's book and it's very good too. I'll try to find the other in the library.

Thanks for the help.

 

[rick1138]

Another book I forgot to mention is Frappat, Sciarrino, and Sorba's Dictionary on Lie Algebras and Superalgebras. The topics are enumerated largely through representations - one of the best books on Lie theory I have come across.

 

[Janitor]

Back in the early 1980s I worked my way through an introductory book on the topic, Lichtenberg's Unitary Symmetry and Elementary Particles. Whether it is stil in print I wouldn't know.

 

[rick1138]

That sounds like a good one. Here is another set of notes:

http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~sg/p641.html

"Notes on gauge theory. Probably covered last semester, but may be useful for HW 1"

is the file that covers representation theory most explicitly. It has the clearest exposition of decomposing products of reps into sums using Young tableaux that I have seen anywhere,