Effective Field Theories

This book is a broad-based text intended to help the growing student body interested in constructing and applying methods of effective field theory to solve problems in their research. It begins with a review of using symmetries to identify the relevant degrees of freedom in a problem, and then presents a variety of methods that can be used to construct various effective theories. A detailed discussion of canonical applications of effective field theory techniques with increasing complexity is given, including Fermi's weak interaction, heavy-quark effective theory, and soft-collinear effective theory. Applications of these techniques to study physics beyond the standard model, dark matter, and quantum and classical gravity are explored. Although most examples come from questions in high-energy physics, many of the methods can also be applied in condensed-matter settings. Appendices include various factoids from group theory and other topics that are used throughout the text, in an attempt to make the book self-contained.

Contents:

• Introduction
• Symmetries
• Elementary Techniques
• Effective Field Theories of Type I
• Effective Field Theories of Type II. Part A
• Effective Field Theories of Type II. Part B
• Effective Field Theories of Type III. Fast Particles in Effective Theories
• Standard Model as an Effective Field Theory
• Effective Field Theories of Gravity
• Outlook

Readership: For the advanced student having studied quantum field theory at the level of Peskin and Schroeder's text.
Key Features:

• Presents the only comprehensive book on effective field theories and their applications in different subfields of theoretical physics on the market
• Includes new topics such as soft-collinear effective theory that are not included in any other textbook