Lectures of Sidney Coleman on Quantum Field Theory

Foreword by David Kaiser

'Sidney Coleman was the master teacher of quantum field theory. All of us who knew him became his students and disciples. Sidney’s legendary course remains fresh and bracing, because he chose his topics with a sure feel for the essential, and treated them with elegant economy.'

Frank WilczekNobel Laureate in Physics 2004

Sidney Coleman was a physicist's physicist. He is largely unknown outside of the theoretical physics community, and known only by reputation to the younger generation. He was an unusually effective teacher, famed for his wit, his insight and his encyclopedic knowledge of the field to which he made many important contributions. There are many first-rate quantum field theory books (the venerable Bjorken and Drell, the more modern Itzykson and Zuber, the now-standard Peskin and Schroeder, and the recent Zee), but the immediacy of Prof. Coleman's approach and his ability to present an argument simply without sacrificing rigor makes his book easy to read and ideal for the student. Part of the motivation in producing this book is to pass on the work of this outstanding physicist to later generations, a record of his teaching that he was too busy to leave himself.

Contents:

• Adding Special Relativity to Quantum Mechanics
• The Simplest Many-Particle Theory
• Constructing a Scalar Quantum Field
• The Method of the Missing Box
• Symmetries and Conservation Laws I. Spacetime Symmetries
• Symmetries and Conservation Laws II. Internal Symmetries
• Introduction to Perturbation Theory and Scattering
• Perturbation Theory I. Wick Diagrams
• Perturbation Theory II. Divergences and Counterterms
• Mass Renormalization and Feynman Diagrams
• Scattering I. Mandelstam Variables, CPT and Phase Space
• Scattering II. Applications
• Green's Functions and Heisenberg Fields
• The LSZ Formalism
• Renormalization I. Determination of Counterterms
• Renormalization II. Generalization and Extension
• Unstable Particles
• Representations of the Lorentz Group
• The Dirac Equation I. Constructing a Lagrangian
• The Dirac Equation II. Solutions
• The Dirac Equation III. Quantization and Feynman Rules
• CPT and Fermi Fields
• Renormalization of Spin-1⁄2 Theories
• Isospin
• Coping with Infinities: Regularization and Renormalization
• Vector Fields
• Electromagnetic Interactions and Minimal Coupling
• Functional Integration and Feynman Rules
• Extending the Methods of Functional Integrals
• Electrodynamics with a Massive Photon
• The Faddeev Popov Prescription
• Generating Functionals and Green's Functions
• The Renormalization of QED
• Two Famous Results in QED
• Confronting Experiment with QED
• Introducing SU(3)
• Irreducible Multiplets in SU(3)
• SU(3): Proofs and Applications
• Broken SU(3) and the Naive Quark Model
• Weak Interactions and Their Currents
• Current Algebra and PCAC
• Current Algebra and Pion Scattering
• A First Look at Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking
• Perturbative Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking
• Topics in Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking
• The Higgs Mechanism and Non-Abelian Gauge Fields
• The Higgs Mechanism and Non-Abelian Gauge Fields
• The Glashow Salam Weinberg Model I. A Theory of Leptons
• The Glashow Salam Weinberg Model II. Adding Quarks
• The Renormalization Group

Readership: Graduate students and academics interested in quantum field theory.
Key Features:

• Based on Coleman's own handwritten notes, two sets of notes from former graduate students, homework, solutions, past examinations
• Some missing steps addressed in derivations or arguments, maintaining as far as possible Coleman's own language