The main pacemakers of scienti?c research are curiosity, ingenuity, and a pinch of persistence. Equipped with these characteristics a young researcher will be s- cessful in pushing scienti?c discoveries. And there is still a lot to discover and to understand. In the course of understanding the origin and structure of matter it is now known that all matter is made up of six types of quarks. Each of these carry a different mass. But neither are the particular mass values understood nor is it known why elementary particles carry mass at all. One could perhaps accept some small generic mass value for every quark, but nature has decided differently. Two quarks are extremely light, three more have a somewhat typical mass value, but one quark is extremely massive. It is the top quark, the heaviest quark and even the heaviest elementary particle that we know, carrying a mass as large as the mass of three iron nuclei. Even though there exists no explanation of why different particle types carry certain masses, the internal consistency of the currently best theory—the standard model of particle physics—yields a relation between the masses of the top quark, the so-called W boson, and the yet unobserved Higgs particle. Therefore, when one assumes validity of the model, it is even possible to take precise measurements of the top quark mass to predict the mass of the Higgs (and potentially other yet unobserved) particles.

In this thesis, the first measurement of the running of the top quark mass is presented. This is a fundamental quantum effect that had never been studied before. Any deviation from the expected behaviour can be interpreted as a hint of the presence of physics beyond the Standard Model. All relevant aspects of the analysis are extensively described and documented. This thesis also describes a simultaneous measurement of the inclusive top quark-antiquark production cross section and the top quark mass in the simulation. The measured cross section is also used to precisely determine the values of the top quark mass and the strong coupling constant by comparing to state-of-the-art theoretical predictions. All the theoretical and experimental aspects relevant to the results presented in this thesis are discussed in the initial chapters in a concise but complete way, which makes the material accessible to a wider audience.

In an epoch when particle physics is awaiting a major step forward, the Large Hydron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Geneva will soon be operational. It will collide a beam of high energy protons with another similar beam circulation in the same 27 km tunnel but in the opposite direction, resulting in the production of many elementary particles some never created in the laboratory before. It is widely expected that the LHC will discover the Higgs boson, the particle which supposedly lends masses to all other fundamental particles. In addition, the question as to whether there is some new law of physics at such high energy is likely to be answered through this experiment. The present volume contains a collection of articles written by international experts, both theoreticians and experimentalists, from India and abroad, which aims to acquaint a non-specialist with some basic issues related to the LHC. At the same time, it is expected to be a useful, rudimentary companion of introductory exposition and technical expertise alike, and it is hoped to become unique in its kind. The fact that there is substantial Indian involvement in the entire LHC endeavour, at all levels including fabrication, physics analysis procedures as well as theoretical studies, is also amply brought out in the collection.

This will be a required acquisition text for academic libraries. More than ten years after its discovery, still relatively little is known about the top quark, the heaviest known elementary particle. This extensive survey summarizes and reviews top-quark physics based on the precision measurements at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider, as well as examining in detail the sensitivity of these experiments to new physics. Finally, the author provides an overview of top quark physics at the Large Hadron Collider.

This volume offers a valuable insight into various aspects of the ongoing work directed at measuring neutrino mass. It took twenty years to refute the assertions of Bethe and Peierls that neutrinos were not observable, but it has since been realised that much can be learnt from these particles. The moral is, as Fiorini argues here, that the study of neutrinos was and remains demanding but rewarding. Subjects addressed in this volume include; clarifying the meaning of the Klapdor-Kleingrothaus results, probing the Majorana nature of neutrinos, observing lepton number violating effects for the first time, studying the end point of the spectrum in the search for neutrino masses and speculating whether it is possible to measure neutrino masses in cosmology. Lectures are enriched with rich historical overviews and valuable introductory material. Attention is also given to theoretical topics such as the evolution of the concept of mass in particle physics, a status report on neutrino oscillations and current discussion on neutrino masses. The reader is further reminded that neutrino masses may also have some bearing on the very origin of the matter among us, and have many deep links with other important lines of current physics research.

This book contains pedagogical lectures on both theoretical and experimental particle physics, cosmology, and atomic trap physics. Numerous additional contributions provide up-to-date information on new experimental results from accelerators, underground laboratories, and nuclear astrophysics. This combination of pedagogical talks and topical short discussions presents a comprehensive amount of information and latest developments to researchers.

The Lepton-Photon symposiums — as represented by the contributions in this volume — are among the most popular conferences in high energy physics since they give an in-depth snapshots of the status of the field as provided by leading experts.The volume covers the latest results on flavor factories, quantum chromodynamics (QCD), electroweak physics, dark matter searches, neutrino physics and cosmology, from a phenomenological point of view. It also offers a glimpse of the immediate future of the field through summaries on the status of the next generation of high energy accelerators and planned facilities for astroparticle physics.The review nature of the articles makes the volume particularly useful to students, as well as being of interest to established researches in high-energy physics and related fields.

This unique volume contains the materials of the XXIXth International Workshop on High Energy Physics. The content of the volume is much wider than just high-energy physics and actually concerns all the most fundamental areas of modern physics research: high-energy physics proper, gravitation and cosmology. Presentations embrace both theory and experiment.