Ph 570 Quantum Field Theory Winter 2006

	Instructor:	Laurence G. Yaffe
	Office:	B404
	TA:	Paul Chesler, pchesler@u, 685-2227
	Lectures:	2:30-3:20 am Wed, PAB B109 and 1:30-3:20 am Thu, Savery 153

Tentative Syllabus:

Relativistic fermions 

Quantized spinor fields, Dirac equation, Lorentz invariance, representation independence. Charge conjugation and antiparticles, massless fermions & neutrinos, Grassmann integration and Grassmann functional integrals.

Basic QED 

Free photons, photon-electron interaction, elementary processes.

Yang-Mills fields 

Abelian and non-Abelian gauge fields, functional integral quantization, gauge fixing, Feynman rules

Regularization and renormalization 

Dimensional continuation and other regulators, mass-independent renormalization, running couplings and renormalization group

	Books:	This course has no single textbook; attending lecture and taking good notes is essential.
		The following books are recommended for certain topics:

A. Zee, Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell. Breezy presentation, broad but not overly detailed.

L. Brown, Quantum Field Theory. Good introduction to modern methods, can be challenging.

M. Srednicki, Quantum Field Theory, http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/$\sim$mark/qft.html . New online textbook.

M. Peskin and Schroeder, Introduction to Quantum Field Theory. Good intro to relativistic QFT.

The above books are on reserve in the physics library.