Digest Ible Quantum Field Theory

The present book is the first of its kind in dealing with topological quantum field theories and their applications to topological aspects of four manifolds. It is not only unique for this reason but also because it contains sufficient introductory material that it can be read by mathematicians and theoretical physicists.

This textbook is intended to be used in an introductory course in quantum field theory. It assumes the standard undergraduate education of a physics major and it is designed to appeal to a wide array of physics graduate students, from those studying theoretical and experimental high energy physics to those interested in condensed matter, optical, atomic, nuclear and astrophysicists. It includes a thorough development of the field theoretic approach to nonrelativistic many-body physics as a step in developing a broad-based working knowledge of some of the basic aspects of quantum field theory. It presents a logical, step by step systematic development of relativistic field theory and of functional techniques and their applications to perturbation theory with Feynman diagrams, renormalization, and basic computations in quantum electrodynamics.

The ancient Greeks believed that everything in the Universe should be describable in terms of geometry. This thesis takes several steps towards realising this goal by introducing geometric descriptions of systems such as quantum gravity, fermionic particles and the origins of the Universe itself.

For more than 70 years, quantum field theory (QFT) can be seen as a driving force in the development of theoretical physics. Equally fascinating is the fruitful impact which QFT had in rather remote areas of mathematics. The present book features some of the different approaches, different physically viewpoints and techniques used to make the notion of quantum field theory more precise. For example, the present book contains a discussion including general considerations, stochastic methods, deformation theory and the holographic AdS/CFT correspondence. It also contains a discussion of more recent developments like the use of category theory and topos theoretic methods to describe QFT. The present volume emerged from the 3rd 'Blaubeuren Workshop: Recent Developments in Quantum Field Theory', held in July 2007 at the Max Planck Institute of Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig/Germany. All of the contributions are committed to the idea of this workshop series: 'To bring together outstanding experts working in the field of mathematics and physics to discuss in an open atmosphere the fundamental questions at the frontier of theoretical physics'.