Elementary Particles, QED and beyond, a handwritten tutorial

Today’s Particle Physics, which is about a century old, made us familiar with objects belonging to the infinitely small, and aware of their complex dynamics. This domain of science is also the unique key to get conscious of the underlying physical reality, down to the limits of absolute vacuum or supposed nothingness. And as it turns out, vacuum is quantum, it has its own reality, and particles are quantum field-waves, as if immaterial or ethereal. Although Astrophysics and Cosmology are yet other disciplines, the birth of matter from the Big-Bang singularity is definitely part of our subject. And not surprisingly, the “God particle”, as recently evidenced as the Higgs boson, comes into the picture. And ass of today, the Universe expansion is explained not only by dark matter more important than atomic matter) and dark energy, the adjective meaning that still remains invisible to astronomers. Altogether, this "handwritten" Tutorial - presented like intensive course notes with no mathematical cracks (nor exercices/problems), is meant to provide a rather complete view of Particle Physics, concerning altogether the "Standard Model", i.e. > The different particles types, from elementary (referred to as lepton/quarks and photons) to composites, called hadrons (mesons/baryons) and the gauge bosons ; their family classification through SU(n) symmetries, and the variety of their reactions or transformation channels (i.e. a+b→c+d): > The three interaction forces called electromagnetic, weak and strong, with emphasis on Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), which concerns the first. Here comes the magic and the computational method of Feynman’s diagrams. > The Field Scattering theory ; > The Dirac equation and the relativistic theory of β^-decay ; > The electroweak unification of the first two interactions by Glashow-Weinberg-Salam, which is also an introduction to the Higgs boson field. The last chapter addresses the Universe’s origin, and details the primary formation of particles and H/He atoms, before the stellar nucleosynthesis, up to stellar evolution, neutron stars and black holes. with astrophysics and which encapsulates the whole Universe history. We wish to the reader that this advanced Tutorial will provide much enjoyment (and amazement as well), of the strange beauty of the infinitely small and infinite time.