The seminal paper by Ya. B. Zeldovich (Soviet Physics Uspekhi 11, 381– 393, 1968) is reprinted here, together with an editorial comment on its lasting scientific relevance, and a biography of the author.

Over the last few years it has become increasingly clear that low energy, but high precision experiments provide a powerful and complementary window to physics beyond the Standard Model. In this note we illuminate this by using minicharged particles as an example. We argue that minicharged particles arise naturally in extensions of the Standard Model. Compatibility with charge quantization argu...

There is almost universal agreement among cosmologists that most of the matter in the Universe is dark, and there are very good reasons to believe that most of this dark matter must be nonbaryonic. The two leading candidates for this dark matter are axions and weakly-interacting massive particles (WIMPs), such as the neutralino in supersymmetric extensions of the standard model. I discuss the a...

An ever-increasing body of evidence suggests that weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) constitute the bulk of the matter in the Universe. We illustrate how experimental data, dimensional analysis and Standard Model particle physics are sufficient to evaluate and compare the potential of detectors searching for such particles either directly (e.g. by their scattering in germanium detecto...

In this paper I examine and question Marc Lange’s account of laws, and his claim that the law delineating the range of natural kinds of fundamental particle has a lesser grade of necessity that the laws connecting the fundamental properties of those kinds with their derived properties.

We have determined theoretically the rest mass of the muon neutrino at 50 milli-eV and the rest mass of the electron neutrino at 5 meV, as well as , to 1% accuracy, the ratio of the masses of the stable elementary particles which decay by weak decays. We assume that the particles of the neutrino branch consist of a cubic, isotropic nuclear lattice, held together by the weak nuclear force. The e...

The theory of symmetry breaking in presence of gauge fields is presented, following the historical track. Particular emphasis is placed upon the underlying concepts. Invited talks presented at the 2001 Corfu Summer Institute on Elementary Particle Physics 2 E-mail : [email protected]

It is shown that particle motion in a bent (straight) crystal is accompanied by particle spin rotation and oscillations that allows to measure the tensor electric polarizability of nuclei and elementary particles.

We describe a geometric picture for the pattern of fermion masses of the three generations which is invariant with respect to the renormalization group below the electroweak scale. Moreover, we predict the upper limit for the ratio between the Dirac masses of the μ and τ neutrinos, ( mνμ/mντ ) ≤ (9.6 ± 0.6) × 10. The Standard Model [1, 2] of strong and electroweak interactions describes accurat...