Understand
These notes are an expanded version of lectures given at the 2022 TASI summer school in Boulder, Colorado.
- One goal of these lecture notes is to (partially) bridge the gap between what one learns in typical introductory quantum field theory classes and what one needs to understand to follow modern developments in particle theory beyond the Standard Model.
- Topics covered include global and gauge symmetries, charge quantization, instantons, chiral anomalies, the Strong CP problem, axion models from 4d and from higher dimensions, the expected absence of global symmetries in quantum gravity, and some phenomenological implications thereof.
- If these topics seem to be at best loosely related, I hope that reading the notes will convince you otherwise.