Physics 722, Spring 2021: Quantum Field Theory

Class schedule: T,Th 11am-12:20pm, by Zoom. Zoom link will be emailed prior to each class.
Office hours: I am always happy to speak with students in the class. I will be mostly at home this semester, so email to arrange a Zoom meeting.
Course webpage: http://physics.wm.edu/~erlich/722S21/
Course material will be posted on Blackboard.

Instructor - Josh Erlich
Small Hall, Room 332B
Office Phone: 757-221-3763
Email: erlich@physics.wm.edu

Topics to be covered, as space-time permits:

Course requirements and grade:

Text:  There are quite a few quantum field theory textbooks that emphasize different aspects of the subject. This course will be loosely based on M. Peskin and D. Schroeder, An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory. Corrections to the textbook are available here. I will also provide lecture notes, which have been influenced by a number of sources, most notably Sidney Coleman's lectures. You can find video of Coleman's lectures online here, and lecture notes for the first semester transcribed by Brian Hill here and here, and typeset here. I also borrow from Mehran Kardar's Statistical Physics of Fields. David Tong's lecture notes are excellent. Steven Weinberg's three-book series The Quantum Theory of Fields contains insights not found in other textbooks, and is a useful reference. Matthew Schwartz's book, Quantum Field Theory and the Standard Model, is also excellent.

Problem sets
Homework will be assigned roughly weekly on Thursdays, and due the following Thursday. Problem sets will be available on Blackboard.

Lecture Notes 
Lecture Notes 1 - Introduction, QFT->QM->CM, Coulomb Potential
Lecture Notes 2 - Renormalization
Lecture Notes 3 - Self energy
Lecture Notes 4 - Scalar self energy calculation
Lecture Notes 5 - Fermion self energy
Lecture Notes 6 - Photon self energy, charge renormalization
Lecture Notes 7 - Photon self energy calculation, dimensional regularization
Lecture Notes 8 - Vacuum polarization, Lamb shift, Landau pole
Lecture Notes 9 - Electron vertex function
Lecture Notes 10 - Electron vertex function, part 2
Lecture Notes 11 - Dirac form factor, Infrared divergences
Lecture Notes 12 - Bremsstrahlung, cancellation of IR divergences
Lecture Notes 13 - Minimal subtraction, regulator fields
Lecture Notes 14 - Renormalizability
Lecture Notes 15 - Functional integral quantization
Lecture Notes 16 - Functional integral quantization of fermions
Lecture Notes 17 - Functional integral quantization of the electromagnetic field
Lecture Notes 18 - Lie groups and Lie algebras
Lecture Notes 19 - Non-Abelian gauge theory
Lecture Notes 20 - Quantization of Non-Abelian gauge theory, Fadeev-Popov ghosts
Lecture Notes 21 - Fermion masses and Higgs Yukawa interactions | Spontaneous symmetry breaking and Goldstone's Theorem
Lecture Notes 22 - Higgs mechanism, quantization of spontaneously broken gauge theories
Lecture Notes 23 - The Standard Model
Lecture Notes 24 - The Renormalization Group

Additional material we didn't cover in class:
Lecture Notes 25 - Symmetries and the functional integral
Lecture Notes 26 - Anomalies

Problem sets
Problem Set 1, due Thursday, February 11.
Problem Set 2, due Thursday, February 18.
Problem Set 3, due Thursday, February 25.
Problem Set 4, due Thursday, March 4. Does not need to be turned in.
Problem Set 5, due Thursday, March 11.
Problem Set 6, due Thursday, March 25.
Problem Set 7, due Thursday, April 1.
Problem Set 8, due Thursday, April 15.
Problem Set 9, due Thursday, April 29.
Problem Set 10, due Thursday, May 6.