LHC for String Theorists: Sunil Mukhi

Graduate Course: LHC for String Theorists

Sunil Mukhi
Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai

This course started on August 23 and its first module, MSSM, ended on November 20 2006. The goal of the course was for string theorists at TIFR, Mumbai to educate ourselves about the theoretical ideas likely to be tested at LHC. The bulk of the course is an introduction to the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model followed by a discussion of SUSY breaking. The lectures have been video recorded and are available on this website. The format is high-resolution (720x576) avi at 25 fps (frames per second), and each file is approximately 600 MB, thus it will fit on a regular CD. The files can be played using "mplayer" which is free software available for Linux, Windows and Mac. To install mplayer, please visit the Mplayer page, where you can download the binary or select the "unofficial packages" link at the top to get a package suited to your Linux distribution. For Windows, I recommend the experimental GUI which seems to work fine. Other softwares that work are VLC Player, and Totem, see the Totem page.

Since these files have been encoded with the lavc codec, they might not play on a DVD player. Also, for Windows Media player one would first have to install the lavc codec. So the best option is to do without axis-of-evil software.

Before downloading an entire 600 MB file, you can download this 12 MB Test File which is about two minutes of the first lecture and test your setup on it. When you download a full lecture, it is a good idea to check if you have indeed received the whole file. Run "md5sum filename" on your machine and compare the output with the correct answer given below.

Date Size md5sum

Lecture 1: 23 August 2006 576 MB 04d71904340abe6a1e3a9f01d1a2a158

Lecture 2: 28 August 2006 499 MB 95a645909d0a578c206cc279a82b4080

Lecture 3: 30 August 2006 551 MB eccbddff49e9121a623370a4c1782a0a

Lecture 4: 4 September 2006 546 MB 0d14cac72c018d46910b6f327803a1f2

Lecture 5: 6 September 2006 505 MB be1164a59363d7ebaf64daaf52eb1893

Lecture 6: 13 September 2006 575 MB 59292d5938e3133239b73e087e280b34

Lecture 7: 18 September 2006 549 MB dd031f8b5c748af642c971997b6aeda3

Lecture 8: 27 September 2006 522 MB 43c36e942939a3accff1642a07a89b56

Lecture 9: 2 October 2006 525 MB 2179ccf76c6913edccff8c5c190cdcd3

Lecture 10: 4 October 2006 505 MB 96292889791d948604fc4e7896451d7f

Lecture 11: 9 October 2006 545 MB 145a0c4c0eaf8c502a65510a8f8379cd

Lecture 12: 11 October 2006 429 MB d0c09b0464368dca39c0c9878e2ba85f

Lecture 13: 06 November 2006 422 MB 2232813973b0e0a3dbae8be29c526931

Lecture 14: 08 November 2006 496 MB 6aa88926c47c2336d4eabb5166bbe1b9

Lecture 15: 13 November 2006 447 MB ee36ceee9e049819e9ae95548f557fa9

Lecture 16: 20 November 2006 491 MB 98fe3d2dfca1305b17056e751ea7fee6

July 2011: Anirbit has written a lecture-by-lecture summary of the first eight lectures. You can download this plain text file here (I have edited it slightly, but it is mostly his work, for which I am very grateful to him):

Summary of first eight lectures

Please send your feedback on these lectures to mukhi[at]tifr.res.in. A wise choice of Subject will help me distinguish your mail from Spam!! And in your mail, please mention your institute/city/country.