Quantum Field Theory
Convenor: Dr Tasos Avgoustidis (Nottingham)
Module Code: QFT
Duration (Hours): 10 hourly sessions
Start Date and Commitments
Starts:12/11/2025 - lectures on Wed 12-13, Thu 12-13
Module Details
This module will provide an introduction to Quantum Field Theory, designed to follow-on from PP2: Relativistic Quantum Mechanics. We will construct Feynman rules from first principles and use them to study elementary processes involving scalars and fermions. Our approach will be through canonical quantisation.
This is an introductory course, which will not cover renormalisation.
For QED and non-abelian gauge theories, see module PP3.
Syllabus
Lecture 1: Preliminaries (Classical) - Classical mechanics, Classical Field Theory, Symmetries and Noether currents
Lecture 2: Preliminaries (Quantum) - Canonical Quantization, Schrödinger, Heisenberg & Interaction Pictures, Harmonic Oscillator
Lectures 3 & 4: Free Fields - Canonical Quantization, Vacuum State, Particle States, Causality, Feynman Propagator
Lectures 5 & 6: Interacting Fields - S-Matrix, Wick’s Theorem, Feynman Diagrams, examples
Lecture 7: Spinors - Lorentz Group, Spinor representation
Lecture 8: Dirac Equation
Lectures 9 & 10: Quantization of Dirac Equation - Fermions, Feynman Rules, examples
Resources:
Lecture 1: QFT_lecture_1
Lecture 2: QFT_lecture_2
Lecture 3: QFT_lecture_3
Lecture 4: QFT_lecture_4
Lecture 5: QFT_lecture_5
Lecture 6: QFT_lecture_6
Lecture 7: QFT_lecture_7
Lecture 8: QFT_lecture_8.key
Lecture 9: QFT_lecture_9
Lecture 10: QFT_lecture_10
Problem set: QFT_questions.pdf