Any recommendations for books or articles on the Standard Model?

[randybryan]

I'm an undergrad physics student and have to write an essay on the Higgs boson and the future of the standard model. I don't need to have a comprehensive understanding of the maths underpinning it all, but it's quite difficult to find any undergraduate level reading on the subject. I'm currently trying to glean as much as I can from Perkins 4th edition 'Introduction to High Energy Physics', but a lot of it still requires a sufficient mathematical understanding of it all. This isn't to say I can't put the time into understanding the maths, but I could spend a whole year just reading books about gauge theories before moving onto the rest. There are hundreds of books on the subject, so I just thought I should see if anyone had any recommendations.

 

[Aaron Bex]

Since you are looking for an undergraduate level introduction to the Higgs boson and the standard model, I would recommend the following books:

1. Introduction to Elementary Particles by David Griffiths
2. Particle Physics: A Very Short Introduction by Frank Close
3. The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World by Sean Carroll
4. The Physics of the Standard Model and Beyond by Paul Langacker
5. The Quantum Universe: Everything That Can Happen Does Happen by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw
6. The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? by Leon Lederman and Christopher Hill
7. A Student's Guide to the Standard Model of Particle Physics by Thomas Ferbel
8. An Invitation to Quantum Field Theory by Anthony Zee

These books will provide you with an accessible overview of the Higgs boson, the standard model, and the mathematics behind them. Additionally, the last two books in the list will provide some more in-depth information on the mathematical formalism of quantum field theory.