Currents and Mesons Book

Current and Mesons is the most recent publication in the Chicago Lectures in Physics series. The book presents Professor Sakurai's introduction to a new field of elementary particle physics which has become increasingly important in the past few years. It is based on a course given to his advanced graduate students in theoretical high-energy physics at the University of Chicago.

The author begins with a brief review of SU (3). The major topics then treated are the divergence condition and current commutation relations, vector meson universality, PCAC and the Goldberger-Treiman relation, soft pion processes, and asymptotic symmetries and spectral-function sum rules. The book concludes with a discussion of notation and of normalization convention.

Professor Sakurai's work deals with topics on which much of current discussion on the theory of elementary particles is focused. The material is designed for the advanced student who is seriously interested in doing original work, and as such provides a much needed introduction to the present literature in the field.