TASI 2011 lecture notes: two-component fermion notation and supersymmetry

This is the home page for "TASI 2011 lecture notes: two-component fermion notation and supersymmetry", 1205.4076, by Stephen P. Martin. These notes are a short introduction to practical use of two-component fermion notation for calculating observables such as differential cross-sections and decay rates, based on the much longer article "Two-component spinor techniques and Feynman rules for quantum field theory and supersymmetry", http://arxiv.org/abs/0812.1594 , by Herbi K. Dreiner, Howard E. Haber, and Stephen P. Martin.

Corrections will be collected here. So far there are none.

Please send any corrections, comments or suggestions to me at: spmartin@niu.edu

The arXiv version of these notes uses the spacetime metric signature (-1,+1,+1,+1), as is found for example in the textbooks by Weinberg, by Wess and Bagger, by Srednicki, and in my Supersymmetry Primer. However, some people prefer the metric signature (+1, -1, -1, -1), as is found for example in the field theory textbooks by Ramond, and by Peskin and Schroeder . If you are one of them, you might prefer a PDF file of these notes in the (+1, -1, -1, -1) metric convention, which should be identical in content in every other respect.

My original (handwritten) TASI 2011 blackboard lecture notes are available here. They have almost no overlap with the writeup submitted to the arXiv. That is because better and more complete introductions to the basics of supersymmetry are available elsewhere.

This work is supported in part by National Science Foundation Grant PHY-1068369.