Selected topics on tau physics

The B Factories have generated a large amount of new results on the tau lepton. The present status of some selected topics on tau physics is presented: charged-current universality tests, bounds on lepton-flavour violation, the determination of alpha_s from the inclusive tau hadronic width, and the measurement of |V_{us}| through the Cabibbo-suppressed decays of the tau lepton.Comment: Invited talk at the XXXI International Conference of Theoretical Physics, "Matter to the Deepest", Ustron, Poland, 5-11 September 200

The Standard Model of Electroweak Interactions

Gauge invariance is a powerful tool to determine the dynamical forces among the fundamental constituents of matter. The particle content, structure and symmetries of the Standard Model Lagrangian are discussed. Special emphasis is given to the many phenomenological tests which have established this theoretical framework as the Standard Theory of the electroweak interactions: electroweak precision tests, Higgs searches, quark mixing, neutrino oscillations. The present experimental status is summarized.Comment: Based on lectures given at the 6th CERN-Fermilab Hadron Collider Physics Summer School (Geneva, 2011), 2010 European School of HEP (Raseborg, Finland), 2010 Int. School on Astroparticle Physics (Zaragoza, Spain), 2010 IDPASC School (Sesimbra, Portugal) and 2009 Int. Summer School and Conference on HEP (Mugla, Turkey, 2009). 52 pages, 38 figure

CP Violation

An overview of the phenomenology of CP violation is presented. The Standard Model mechanism of CP violation and its main experimental tests, both in the kaon and bottom systems, are discussed. (Lectures given at the 1993 Trieste Summer School and at the Escuela Latinoamericana de Fisica, ELAF'93, Argentina).Comment: 29 pages, LaTeX (4 figures not included), CERN-TH.7144/9

Dante's 'Strangeness': The Commedia and the Late Twentieth-Century Debate on the Literary Canon

A reflection on Dante and the literary canon may appear tautological since nowadays his belonging to the canon seems a self-evident matter of fact and an indisputable truth. It is for this very reason, though, that a paradigmatic role has been conferred on Dante in the contemporary debate both by those who consider the canon a stable structure based on inner aesthetic values and by those who see it as a cultural and social construction. For instance, Harold Bloom suggests that ‘Dante invented our modern idea of the canonical’, and Edward Said, in his reading of Auerbach, seems to imply that Dante provided foundations for what we call literature tout court. While his influence on other poets never ceased, the story of Dante’s explicit canonization through the centuries revolved around the same critical points we are still discussing today: his anti-classical ‘strangeness’ in language and style, the trouble he occasions in genre hierarchies and distinctions, and the vastness of the philosophical and theological knowledge embraced by the Commedia (and, as a consequence, the relationship between literature and other realms of human experience). Dante’s canonicity is also evinced by the ceaseless debates that he has inspired and the many cultural tensions of which he is the focus. What I will try to do in the next few pages is to reflect on the features that make the Commedia central both to the arguments of the defenders of the aesthetic approach, such as Bloom and Steiner, and to the political claims of the so-called ‘culture of complaint’.Federica Pich, ‘Dante’s ‘Strangeness’: The Commedia and the late Twentieth-Century Debate on the Literary Canon’, in Metamorphosing Dante: Appropriations, Manipulations, and Rewritings in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati, Fabio Camilletti, and Fabian Lampart, Cultural Inquiry, 2 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2011), pp. 21–35 <https://doi.org/10.25620/ci-02_02

The Standard Model of Particle Physics: Status & Low-Energy Tests

Precision measurements of low-energy observables provide stringent tests of the Standard Model structure and accurate determinations of its parameters. An overview of the present experimental status is presented. The main topics discussed are the muon anomalous magnetic moment, the asymptotic freedom of strong interactions, the lepton universality of gauge couplings, the quark flavour structure and CP violation.Comment: 12 pages, 6 Postscript Figure