The Amateur Scientist: Supersymmetry

One early obstacle for the amateur scientist trying to understand supersymmetry is notation. When our humble A.S., aka, CIP, opened up Wess and Bagger's Supersymmetry and Supergravity for example, he was met with some unfamiliar notation, indices, indices, indices, dotted and un-. What to make of it? Well, W&B are kind enough to include some notational information in Appendix A, but that, alas, revealed yet more lacunae in the pig's comprehension - or perhaps I should say yet more oceans of ignorance between the occasional islands of his knowledge. Representations of the Lorentz group - I'm sure I must have encountered that somewhere in a QFT course or study, but for some reason it's pretty fuzzy.

Lots of QFT books talk about this stuff of course, but notation, er, varies. Let me just mention two books I have found that explain this stuff very clearly and simply, and in modern, or at least W&B, notation: Mark Srednicki's Quantum Field Theory and Ian Aitchison's Supersymmetry.

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