This biennial Review summarizes much of particle physics. Using data from previous editions, plus 2658 new measurements from 644 papers, we list, evaluate, and average measured properties of gauge bosons, leptons, quarks, mesons, and baryons. We summarize searches for hypothetical particles such as Higgs bosons, heavy neutrinos, and supersymmetric particles. All the particle properties and search limits are listed in Summary Tables. We also give numerous tables, figures, formulae, and reviews of topics such as the Standard Model, particle detectors, probability, and statistics. Among the 112 reviews are many that are new or heavily revised including those on Heavy-Quark and Soft-Collinear Effective Theory, Neutrino Cross Section Measurements, Monte Carlo Event Generators, Lattice QCD, Heavy Quarkonium Spectroscopy, Top Quark, Dark Matter, V-cb & V-ub, Quantum Chromodynamics, High-Energy Collider Parameters, Astrophysical Constants, Cosmological Parameters, and Dark Matter. A booklet is available containing the Summary Tables and abbreviated versions of some of the other sections of this full Review. All tables, listings, and reviews (and errata) are also available on the Particle Data Group website: http://pdg.lbl.gov
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We show that a bounded, isolated quantum system of many particles in a specific initial state will approach thermal equilibrium if the energy eigenfunctions which are superposed to form that state obey Berry's conjecture. Berry's conjecture is expected to hold only if the corresponding classical system is chaotic, and essentially states that the energy eigenfunctions behave as if they were gaussian random variables. We review the existing evidence, and show that previously neglected effects substantially strengthen the case for Berry's conjecture. We study a rarefied hard-sphere gas as an explicit example of a many-body system which is known to be classically chaotic, and show that an energy eigenstate which obeys Berry's conjecture predicts a Maxwell-Boltzmann, Bose-Einstein, or Fermi-Dirac distribution for the momentum of each constituent particle, depending on whether the wave functions are taken to be nonsymmetric, completely symmetric, or completely antisymmetric functions of the positions of the particles. We call this phenomenon eigenstate thermalization. We show that a generic initial state will approach thermal equilibrium at least as fast as O(h/∆)t −1 , where ∆ is the uncertainty in the total energy of the gas. This result holds for an individual initial state; in contrast to the classical theory, no averaging over an ensemble of initial states is needed. We argue that these results constitute a new foundation for quantum statistical mechanics. Phys. Rev. E, in press
The ground state density matrix for a massless free field is traced over the degrees of freedom residing inside an imaginary sphere; the resulting entropy is shown to be proportional to the area (and not the volume) of the sphere.Possible connections with the physics of black holes are discussed. * This work was supported in part by the
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