We have mentioned already at the beginning of the book that the fundamental role in elementary particle physics, that is, the SM and its extensions, is played by Lagrangians. They encode the information about the particle content of a given theory and of fundamental interactions between these particles that are characteristic for this theory. Therefore, it is essential to start our presentation by discussing the general structure of various Lagrangians that we will encounter in this book.The theories we will discuss are relativistic quantum field theories, and it would appear at first sight that this first step of our expedition is extremely difficult. Yet, the seminal observation of Feynman that a given classical theory can be quantized by means of the path integral method simplifies things significantly. We can formulate the quantum field theory with the help of a Lagrangian of a classical field theory without introducing operators as done in canonical quantization. Having it, a simple set of steps allows us to derive the so-called Feynman rules and use them to calculate the implications of a given theory for various observables that can be compared with experiment.A very important role in particle physics is played by symmetries. They increase significantly the predictive power of a given theory, in particular by reducing the number of free parameters. In this context a very good example is quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of strong interactions. With eight gluons and three colors for quarks, there is a multitude of interactions that, without the SU(3) symmetry governing them, could be rather arbitrary. But the SU(3) symmetry implies certain conservation laws, and at the end there is only a single parameter in QCD: the value of the strong coupling evaluated at some energy scale that can be determined in experiment. Once this is done, all effects of strong interactions can be uniquely predicted, even if this requires often very difficult calculations.The case of QCD is however special as it is based on an exact nonabelian symmetry. We will be more specific about this terminology later. In quantum electrodynamics (QED), which is based on an exact abelian symmetry U(1), in addition to the value of the electromagnetic coupling also the electric charges of quarks and leptons and generally fermions, scalars, and vector particles in a given theory are free. They have to be determined in experiment. In QCD all color charges are fixed by the SU(3) symmetry.Yet QED, similar to QCD, is a very predictive theory because it is based on an exact symmetry. This is generally not the case in nature, and on many occasions the symmetries that we encounter in particle physics are only approximate, and the manner in which 25