Probing the Standard Model of Particle Interactions (Les Houches)

The Standard Model (SM) of particle interactions, since its formulation in the early seventies, remains the only serious candidate theory describing three of the four forces of nature - weak, electromagnetic and strong. All present experimental data are consistent with this theory, however our understanding of the SM is far from complete. Over the last twenty years a number of techniques have been developed to obtain quantitative predictions of interactions involving hadrons from the standard model. These include perturbative QCD calculations, lattice QCD, chiral perturbation theory, large Nc expansions, QCD sum rules, heavy quark effective theory, and approaches based on simple models that cannot be derived from QCD.The aims of this school were to provide an introduction to the different theoretical approaches and assess their relative strengths and successes, and to summarize the existing important open problems and tests of the SM for which there will be experimental input during the next decade. The resulting book is a pedagogical survey of the field which will be a valuable guide for a new generation of students.The school was divided into roughly two equal parts - the core lectures and the advanced courses. The core lectures provide an introduction to field theory, the Standard Model, and the methods used to study them. The advanced courses build upon these introductory courses and pave the way for students to reach the frontiers and possibly start research in some of the current exciting topics. To this end a balance was sought and achieved between theory and experiment.