Physics 215a, Quantum Field Theory 2019

Professor: Ken Intriligator, Mayer Hall 5234. Office hours: after class, or stop by.

TA: Zhengdi Sun, Mayer Hall 4430. Office hours: Thursdays, 2:00-3:20, or stop by.

Question and answer session Tuesday Dec 10, MYR-A 2623, 11:00am-noon.

Text: The lectures will largely follow these free, online notes:

  • Sidney Coleman's lectures. Classic videos can be found here . World Scientific made the lectures into a book, but I do not support it because they misguidedly included the solutions to Coleman's classic exercises, which just encourages lazy shortcuts and takes the challenge out of the exercise. Please avoid that.

  • David Tong's beautiful lecture notes Videos can be found here.

  • John McGreevy's beautiful lecture notes .

    Recommended book for advanced QFT topics Coleman's Aspects of Symmetry. I will probably discuss some of the topics there in part III in the Spring.

    Course Times: MW 2:00-3:20pm, MYR-A 2623.

    Final Exam: Wednesday, December 11, 3:00-6:00pm, MHR-A 2623.

    Homework: It is essential to do your exercises. Many of the assigned problems have solutions that can be found online -- try to resist that, it's cheating both yourself, and it is technically, officially cheating. Working together in groups is fine, and encouraged, as long as everyone is working.

    Homework: Homework: 50%, final 50%.

    My 215a course webpage from 2015

    • lecture# topic (and link to notes) Homework
    9/30 Introduction to field theory   HW 1 (Due Oct 7)        
    10/2 Field theory and quantization          
    10/7 Feynman propagator, etc   HW 2 (due 10/14)        
    10/9 Propagator, Wick contractions etc          
    10/14 Interaction picture,Dyson's formula          
    10/21 Dyson's formula for toy model   HW 3 (due 10/28)        
    10/23 Toy model amplitudes, Feynman rules          
    10/25 Amplitudes, Feynman rules, cont.          
    10/28 Physics from amplitudes   HW 4 (due 11/6)        
    10/30 Physics from amplitudes, cont.          
    11/4 LSZ reduction          
    11/6 LSZ reduction. Start path integral   HW 5 (due 11/13)        
    11/13 Path integral quantization   HW 6 (due 11/20)        
    11/18 Z[J], W[J], etc.          
    11/20 Fermions   HW 7 (Due Dec 2)        
    11/25 QFT for a Dirac field          
    11/27 Fermion Feynman rules,          
    12/3 Fermion Feynman rules cont, start spin 1          
    12/5 Gauge theory and QED tree level processes   HW 8 (not turned in)