Instructor: Joe Polchinski, joep@kitp.ucsb.edu
Course Web Site: http://www.kitp.ucsb.edu/physics-221b-qft-winter-2015
Class: MW 5:00-6:30 Phelps 1445. Note that each class is 15 minutes longer, for makeup.
Office Hours: W 1:30-2:45, F 4-5 Kohn (KITP) 2139, and by appointment.
Textbook: Quantum Field Theory, Srednicki.
Homework: Weekly, due Monday in class
Grader: Unfortunately it has not been possible to find a grader, so my plan will be to look over the homeworks to see how well things are understood, and prepare some solution sets, at least for the key problems. Grades will be based primarily on the final exam, and also on handing in reasonably complete homeworks on time. The important point is that the main way that you learn any subject, and QFT in particular, is to do calculations, so you should do as many as you can, even if they are not graded.
Final exam: 24 hour take-home, open notes, Srednicki, homeworks and solutions. Any 24 hr period of M-F of finals week - email me your desired time to receive the exam.
Exam solutions, updated 1:00am 3/22. Median = 72 St. Dev. = 16
Approximately 2/3 of the quarter will deal with quantization of fermi fields. Other topics include spontaneous symmetry breaking, renormalization, effective field theory, renormalization group. I owe you two makeup lectures, to be scheduled. I plan to cover Hawking radiation in one, not sure of the other.
Syllabus (revised 2/16):
MW 1/12,14: Ch. 33-36: Reps. of Lorentz, Weyl, Majorana, Dirac spinors, spinor Lagrangians. Extension to general dimension.
W 1/21: Ch. 37-39: Quantization of spinor fields
MW 1/26,28: Finish quantization of spinor fields. Ch. 23,40: C,P,T symmetry. CPT and spin-statistics in general. Notes on CPT and Spin-Statistics (last update 3:15 pm Feb. 2: comments on Euclidean path integral added).
MW 2/2,4: Feynman rules for spin-1/2 fields, ch. 42-45.
I will finish the Feynman rules M 2/9, and also clarify what I said about LSZ (ch. 41)
MW 2/9, 11: Cross sections with fermions. Spin and gamma matrix technology. Ch. 46-48, 50.
W 2/18: Loop corrections to the scalar propagator. Ch. 14, 13.
M 2/23: Renomalization, effective field theory. These are in ch. 18, 29, but my presentation will be somewhat different, similar to the first half of these notes.
W 2/25: Loop calculations in scalar field theory, ch. 14, 16
M 3/2: Renormalization group. Ch. 28.
W 3/4: Loops and beta functions in Yukawa theory/
M 3/9: Spontaneous symmetry breaking, ch. 30-32.
W 3/11: Hawking radiation (will not be on final!).
Some references:
Hawking radiation, approaches similar to mine:
1PI Effective Action
Coleman ch. 5 (I will try to post some notes soon).
Homework #1, due at beginning of class Weds. 1/21. Comments #1.
Homework #2 (short!), due at beginning of class Mon. 1/26. Comments #2.
Homework #3, due at beginning of class Mon. 2/2. Comments #3.
Homework #4, due at beginning of class Mon. 2/11. Comments #4. (updated 2/22)
Homework #5, due at the beginning of class Wed. 2/18. Comments #5. (updated 2/26 - I had misunderstood Mark's notation in 3c).
Homework #6, (short!), due at the beginning of class Mon. 2/23. Comments #6.
Homework #7, due at the beginning of class Mon 3/2. Comments #7. 3/14: Figure added to problem 3.
Homework #8, due at the beginning of class Mon 3/9. Comments #8.