Adventures in Theoretical Physics: Selected Papers of Stephen L. Adler -- Commentaries

These are the commentaries for a volume of reprints of my selected papers with commentaries that I am preparing for publication by World Scientific. Contents: Preface; (1)Early Years, and Condensed Matter Physics; (2) High Energy Neutrino Reactions, PCAC Relations, and Sum Rules; (3) Anomalies: Chiral Anomalies and Their Nonrenormalization, Perturbative Corrections to Scaling, and Trace Anomalies to All Orders; (4) Quantum Electrodynamics; (5) Particle Phenomenology and Neutral Currents; (6) Gravitation; (7) Non-Abelian Monopoles, Confinement Models, and Chiral Symmetry Breaking; (8) Overrelaxation for Monte-Carlo and Other Algorithms; (9) Quaternionic Quantum Mechanics, Trace Dynamics, and Emergent Quantum Theory; (10) Where Next?Comment: Latex 115p; Final version. Book version will differ in reference format and indexing; version 3 differs from version 2 by minor copy-editing correction

Developments in high energy theory

This non-technical review article is aimed at readers with some physics background, including beginning research students. It provides a panoramic view of the main theoretical developments in high energy physics since its inception more than half a century ago, a period in which experiments have spanned an enormous range of energies, theories have been developed leading up to the Standard Model, and proposals -- including the radical paradigm of String Theory -- have been made to go beyond the Standard Model. The list of references provided here is not intended to properly credit all original work but rather to supply the reader with a few pointers to the literature, specifically highlighting work done by Indian authors.Comment: 52 pages, 14 figures, corrected versio

Advanced Concepts in Particle and Field Theory

Uniting the usually distinct areas of particle physics and quantum field theory, gravity and general relativity, this expansive and comprehensive textbook of fundamental and theoretical physics describes the quest to consolidate the elementary particles that are the basic building blocks of nature. Designed for advanced undergraduates and graduate students and abounding in worked examples and detailed derivations, as well as historical anecdotes and philosophical and methodological perspectives, this textbook provides students with a unified understanding of all matter at the fundamental level. Topics range from gauge principles, particle decay and scattering cross-sections, the Higgs mechanism and mass generation, to spacetime geometries and supersymmetry. By combining historically separate areas of study and presenting them in a logically consistent manner, students will appreciate the underlying similarities and conceptual connections across these fields. This title, first published in 2015, has been reissued as an Open Access publication

Realisation of chiral symmetry in the domain model of QCD

The domain model for the QCD vacuum has previously been developed and shown to exhibit confinement of quarks and strong correlation of the local chirality of quark modes and duality of the background domain-like gluon field. Quark fluctuations satisfy a chirality violating boundary conditions parametrized by a random chiral angle $\alpha_j$ on the $j-th$ domain. The free energy of an ensemble of $N\to\infty$ domains depends on $\{\alpha_j, j=1... N\}$ through the logarithm of the quark determinant. Its parity odd part is given by the axial anomaly. The anomaly contribution to the free energy suppresses continuous axial U(1) degeneracy in the ground state, leaving only a residual axial Z(2) symmetry. This discrete symmetry and flavour $SU(N_f)_L\times SU(N_f)_R$ chiral symmetry in turn are spontaneously broken with a quark condensate arising due to the asymmetry of the spectrum of Dirac operator. In order to illustrate the splitting between the $\eta'$ from octet pseudoscalar mesons realised in the domain model, we estimate the masses of light pseudoscalar and vector mesons.Comment: 27 pages, uses RevTeX, 3 figures. v.2. includes additional references and comment