xxvi, 576 pages : 26 cm

"Since it was first published, Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell has quickly established itself as the most accessible and comprehensive introduction to this profound and deeply fascinating area of theoretical physics. Now in this fully revised and expanded edition, A. Zee covers the latest advances while providing a solid conceptual foundation for students to build on, making this the most up-to-date and modern textbook on quantum field theory available." "This expanded edition features several additional chapters, as well as an entirely new section describing recent developments in quantum field theory such as gravitational waves, the helicity spinor formalism, on-shell gluon scattering, recursion relations for amplitudes with complex momenta, and the hidden connection between Yang-Mills theory and Einstein gravity. Zee also provides added exercises, explanations, and examples, as well as detailed appendices, solutions to selected exercises, and suggestions for further reading."--Jacket

Includes bibliographical references and index

Convention, notation, and units -- Part I: Motivation and foundation. Who needs it? ; Path integral formulation of quantum physics ; From mattress to field ; From field to particle to force ; Coulomb and Newton : repulsion and attraction ; Inverse square law and the floating 3-brane ; Feynman diagrams ; Quantizing canonically ; Disturbing the vacuum ; Symmetry ; Field theory in curved spacetime ; Field theory redux -- Part II: Dirac and the spinor. The Dirac equation ; Quantizing the Dirac field ; Lorentz group and Weyl spinors ; Spin-statistics connection ; Vacuum energy, Grassmann integrals, and Feynman diagrams for fermions ; Electron scattering and gauge invariance ; Diagrammatic proof of gauge invariance ; Photon-electron scattering and crossing -- Part III: Renormalization and gauge invariance. Cutting off our ignorance ; Renormalizable versus nonrenormalizable ; Counterterms and physical perturbation theory ; Gauge invariance : a photon can find no rest ; Field theory without relativity ; The magnetic moment of the electron ; Polarizing the vacuum and renormalizing the charge ; Becoming imaginary and conserving probability -- Part IV: Symmetry and symmetry breaking. Symmetry breaking ; The pion as a Nambu-Goldstone boson ; Effective potential ; Magnetic monopole ; Nonabelian gauge theory ; The Anderson-Higgs mechanism ; Chiral anomaly -- Part V: Field theory and collective phenomena. Superfluids ; Euclid, Boltzmann, Hawking, and field theory at finite temperature ; Landau-Ginzburg theory of critical phenomena ; Superconductivity ; Peierls instability ; Solitons ; Vortices, monopoles, and instantons -- Part VI: Field theory and condensed matter. Fractional statistics, Chern-Simons term, and topological field theory ; Quantum hall fluids ; Duality ; The [Sigma] models as effective field theories ; Ferromagnets and antiferromagnets ; Surface growth and field theory ; Disorder : replicas and Grassmannian symmetry ; Renormalization group flow as a natural concept in high energy and condensed matter physics -- Part VII: Grand unification. Quantizing Yang-Mills theory and lattice gauge theory ; Electroweak unification ; Quantum chromodynamics ; Large N expansion ; Grand unification ; Protons are not forever ; SO (10) unification -- Part VIII: Gravity and beyond. Gravity as a field theory and the Kaluza-Klein picture ; The cosmological constant problem and the cosmic coincidence problems ; Effective field theory approach to understanding nature ; Supersymmetry : a very brief introduction ; A glimpse of string theory as a 2-dimensional field theory -- Closing words -- Part N. Gravitational waves and effective field theory ; Gluon scattering in pure Yang-Mills theory ; Subterranean connections in gauge theories ; Is Einstein gravity secretly the square of Yang-Mills theory? -- More closing words -- Appendix A: Gaussian integration and the central identity of quantum field theory -- Appendix B: A brief review of group theory -- Appendix C: Feynman rules -- Appendix D: Various identities and Feynman integrals -- Appendix E: Dotted and undotted indices and the Majorana spinor -- Solutions to selected exercises

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