While electromagnetic interactions were first used to probe the structure of elementary particles more than 20 years ago, their importance has only become fully evident in the last 10 years. In the resonance region, photo production experiments have provided clear evidence for simple quark model ideas, and confirmed the Melosh-transformed SU(6)w as a relevant symmetry classification. At higher energies, their most striking feature is their similarity to hadron-induced reactions, and they have provided fresh insight into the ideas developed to explain strong-interaction physics. New dimensions are added by taking the photon off mass shell, both in the spacelike region, where the development of high-energy electron and muon beams has led to the discovery and study of scaling and the intro duction of "partons," and even more dramatically in the timelike region, where the development of high-energy electron-positron storage rings has led to the exciting discoveries of the last four years. In view of the immense interest stimulated by these developments, an extensive review of our present state of knowledge is both timely and useful. Because of the very wide range of the subject, a cooperative venture presents itself as the most suitable format and is the one we have adopted here. The emphasis throughout is primarily, but not entirely, on phenomenology, concentrating on describing the main features of the experimental data and on the theoretical ideas used directly in their inter pretation.

Vladimir Gribov was one of the founding fathers of high-energy elementary particle physics. This volume derives from a graduate lecture course he delivered in the 1970s. It provides graduate students and researchers with the opportunity to learn from the teaching of one of the twentieth century's greatest physicists. Its content is still deeply relevant to modern research, for example exploring properties of the relativistic theory of hadron interactions in a domain of peripheral collisions and large distances that quantum chromodynamics has barely approached. In guiding the reader step-by-step from the basics of quantum mechanics and relativistic kinematics to the most challenging problems of high-energy hadron interactions with simplifying models and physical analogies, it demonstrates general methods of addressing difficult problems in theoretical physics. Covering a combination of topics not treated elsewhere, this 2008 title has been reissued as an Open Access publication on Cambridge Core.

While electromagnetic interactions were first used to probe the structure of elementary particles more than 20 years ago, their importance has only become fully evident in the last 10 years. In the resonance region, photo production experiments have provided clear evidence for simple quark model ideas, and confirmed the Melosh-transformed SU(6)w as a relevant symmetry classification. At higher energies, their most striking feature is their similarity to hadron-induced reactions, and they have provided fresh insight into the ideas developed to explain strong-interaction physics. New dimensions are added by taking the photon off mass shell, both in the spacelike region, where the development of high-energy electron and muon beams has led to the discovery and study of scaling and the intro duction of "partons," and even more dramatically in the timelike region, where the development of high-energy electron-positron storage rings has led to the exciting discoveries of the last four years. In view of the immense interest stimulated by these developments, an extensive review of our present state of knowledge is both timely and useful. Because of the very wide range of the subject, a cooperative venture presents itself as the most suitable format and is the one we have adopted here. The emphasis throughout is primarily, but not entirely, on phenomenology, concentrating on describing the main features of the experimental data and on the theoretical ideas used directly in their inter pretation.

This is a selection from over 250 papers published by Abdus Salam. Professor Salam has been Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College, London and Director of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, for which he was largely responsible for creating. He is one of the most distinguished theoretical physicists of his generation and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1979 for his work on the unification of electromagnetic and weak interactions. He is well known for his deep interest in the development of scientific research in the third world (to which ICTP is devoted) and has taken a leading part in setting up the Third World Academy. His research work has ranged widely over quantum field theory and all aspects of the theory of elementary particles and more recently into other fields, including high-temperature superconductivity and theoretical biology. The papers selected represent a cross section of his work covering the entire period of 50 years from his student days to the present.

The book provides theoretical and phenomenological insights on the structure of matter, presenting concepts and features of elementary particle physics and fundamental aspects of nuclear physics. Starting with the basics (nomenclature, classification, acceleration techniques, detection of elementary particles), the properties of fundamental interactions (electromagnetic, weak and strong) are introduced with a mathematical formalism suited to undergraduate students. Some experimental results (the discovery of neutral currents and of the W± and Z0 bosons; the quark structure observed using deep inelastic scattering experiments) show the necessity of an evolution of the formalism. This motivates a more detailed description of the weak and strong interactions, of the Standard Model of the microcosm with its experimental tests, and of the Higgs mechanism. The open problems in the Standard Model of the microcosm and macrocosm are presented at the end of the book. For example, the CP violation currently measured does not explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the observable universe; the neutrino oscillations and the estimated amount of cosmological dark matter seem to require new physics beyond the Standard Model. A list of other introductory texts, work reviews and some specialized publications is reported in the bibliography. Translation from the Italian Language Edition "Particelle e interazioni fondamentali" by Sylvie Braibant, Giorgio Giacomelli, and Maurizio Spurio Copyright © Springer-Verlag Italia, 2009 Springer-Verlag Italia is part of Springer Science+Business Media All Rights Reserved

Intended for graduate students, advanced undergraduates and research staff in particle physics and related disciplines and will also be of interest to physicists not working in this field who want an overview of the present development of the subject.