The dynamics of the universe may be dominated by novel weakly interacting elementary particles, by baryons in an invisible form, by black holes, and globally by vacuum energy. The main arguments for and against such hypotheses are reviewed.

In the context of the fact that the existence of dark energy causing the accelerated expansion of the universe has been confirmed by the WMAP and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, we reexamine gravitation itself, starting with the formulation of Sakharov and show that it is possible to obtain gravitation in terms of the electromagnetic charge of elementary particles, once the ZPF and its effects at...

Pre-white dwarf (PWD) evolution can be driven by energy losses from neutrino interactions in the core. Unlike solar neutrinos, these are not the by-product of nuclear fusion, but instead result from electron scattering processes in the hot, dense regions of the PWD core. We show that the observed rate of period change in cool PWD pulsators will constrain neutrino emission in their cores, and we...

The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the concept of an elementary particle in the first-quantized Standard Model. The emphasis is upon the mathematical structures involved, rather than numerical computations. After the general concepts and philosophical outlook are introduced in the opening section, Section 2 addresses the question of what a free elementary particle is, paying particular a...

These lectures deal with the complex structure of the ground state, or vacuum, of Quantum Chromo Dynamics (QCD) and its low-energy excitations, the hadrons. QCD, the theory of quarks, gluons and their interactions, is a self-contained part of the Standard Model of elementary particles. It is a consistent quantum field theory with a simple and elegant underlying Lagrangian, based entirely on the...

I have been asked to review the history of the formation of the Standard Model. It is natural to tell this story as a sequence of brilliant ideas and experiments, but here I will also talk about some of the misunderstandings and false starts that went along with this progress, and why some steps were not taken until long after they became possible. The study of what was not understood by scient...

A standard version of a kinetic instability for the generation of Langmuir waves by a beam of electrons is adapted to describe the analogous instability due to a beam of neutrinos. The interaction between a Langmuir wave and a neutrino is treated in the one-loop approximation to lowest order in an expansion in 1/M W in the standard electroweak model. It is shown that this kinetic instability is...

The nature of baryon resonances is studied in the dynamical chiral coupled-channel approach for meson-baryon scattering. In general, origin of resonances in two-body scattering can be classified into two categories: dynamically generated states and genuine elementary particles. We demonstrate that the genuine contribution in the loop function can be excluded by adopting a natural renormalizatio...

Objects and systems at all scales operate by a mix of internal impulsion and external influence. This phenomenon, ubiquitous and accurately modeled by simple systems of coupled oscillators, are observed in systems of elementary subatomic particle, biological populational dynamics and interactions of heavenly bodies on an astronomical scale. Despite the simplicity of coupled oscillator models li...

The search for electric dipole moments (EDM) of fundamental particles started approximately fifty years with Ramsey’s search for a neutron EDM. Even though the techniques have been improved and the sensitivities has reached an unprecedented small level no EDM of a fundamental particle has been observed so far. Non-the-less EDM experiments have put strict limits and constrained the parameter spa...