Convenor: Dr Tasos Avgoustidis (Nottingham)

Module Code: QFT

Duration (Hours): 10 hourly sessions

Start Date and Commitments

Starts:14/11/2023 - 10 lectures on Tues 10-11, Thu 10-11

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:

www.nottingham.ac.uk/~ppzaa3/QFT_resources.pdf

Lecture 1: www.nottingham.ac.uk/~ppzaa3/QFT_lecture_1.pdf

Lecture 2: www.nottingham.ac.uk/~ppzaa3/QFT_lecture_2.pdf

Lecture 3: www.nottingham.ac.uk/~ppzaa3/QFT_lecture_3.pdf

Lecture 4: www.nottingham.ac.uk/~ppzaa3/QFT_lecture_4.pdf

Lecture 5: www.nottingham.ac.uk/~ppzaa3/QFT_lecture_5.pdf

Lecture 6: www.nottingham.ac.uk/~ppzaa3/QFT_lecture_6.pdf

Lecture 7: www.nottingham.ac.uk/~ppzaa3/QFT_lecture_7.pdf

Lecture 8: www.nottingham.ac.uk/~ppzaa3/QFT_lecture_8.pdf

Lecture 9: www.nottingham.ac.uk/~ppzaa3/QFT_lecture_9.pdf

Lecture 10: www.nottingham.ac.uk/~ppzaa3/QFT_lecture_10.pdf

Problem set: www.nottingham.ac.uk/~ppzaa3/QFT_questions.pdf