Luciano Maiani, born in 1941, is emeritus professor of theoretical physics at the University of Rome, "La Sapienza", and author of more than two hundred scientific publications on the theoretical physics of elementary particles. He, together with S. Glashow and J. Iliopoulos, made the prediction of a new family of particles, those with "charm", which form an essential part of the unified theory of the weak and electromagnetic forces. He has been president of the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), Director-General of CERN in Geneva and president of the Italian National Council for Research (CNR). He promoted the development of the Virgo Observatory for gravitational wave detection, the neutrino beam from CERN to Gran Sasso and at CERN directed the crucial phases of the construction of the Large Hadron Collider. He has taught and worked in numerous foreign institutes. He was head of the theoretical physics department at the University of Rome, "La Sapienza", from 1976 to 1984 and held the chair of theoretical physics from 1984 to 2011. He is a member of the Italian Lincean Academy and a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Omar Benhar, born in 1953, is an INFN research director and teaches gauge theories at the University of Rome, "La Sapienza". He has worked extensively in the USA as visiting professor, at the University of Illinois and the Old Dominion University, as well as associate scientist at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. Since 2013, he has served as an adjunct professor at the Centre for Neutrino Physics of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He is the author of more than a hundred scientific papers on the theory of many-particle systems, the structure of compact stars and electroweak interactions of nuclei.

Chapter 1: The Symmetries of Space-Time. Chapter 2: The Classical Free Particle. Chapter 3: The Lagrangian Theory of Fields. Chapter 4: The Klein-Gordon Field Quantisation. Chapter 5: Electromagnetic Field Quantisation. Chapter 6: The Dirac Equation. Chapter 7: Quantisation of the Dirac Field. Chapter 8: Free Field Propagators. Chapter 9: Interactions. Chapter 10: Time Evolution of Quantum Systems. Chapter 11: Relativistic Perturbation Theory. Chapter 12: The Discrete Symmetries: P, C, T. Chapter 13: Weyl and Majorana Neutrinos. Chapter 14: Applications: QED. Chapter 15: Applications: Weak Interactions. Chapter 16: Neutrino Oscillations. Chapter 17: Neutrinoless Double-Beta Decay. Chapter 18: A Leap Forward: Charmonium. Chapter 19: The Born-Oppenheimer Approximation for the Doubly Charmed Baryon. Appendix A: Basic Elements of Quantum Mechanics. Appendix B: The Non-relativistic Hydrogen Atom. Bibliography. Index.