Quantum Scriptwriting

Practical scriptwriting - work alongside me. Feedback encouraged!

As a graduate student working in quantum optics I encountered the question that might be taken as the theme of this book. The question definitely arose at that time though it was not yet very clearly defined; there was simply some deep irritation caused by the work I was doing, something quite fundamental I did not understand. Of course, so many things are not understood when one is a graduate student. However, my nagging question was not a technical issue, not merely a mathematical concept that was difficult to grasp.

We are often told that quantum phenomena demand radical revisions of our scientific world view and that no physical theory describing well defined objects, such as particles described by their positions, evolving in a well defined way, let alone deterministically, can account for such phenomena. The great majority of physicists continue to subscribe to this view, despite the fact that just such a deterministic theory, accounting for all of the phe­ nomena of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, was proposed by David Bohm more than four decades ago and has arguably been around almost since the inception of quantum mechanics itself. Our purpose in asking colleagues to write the essays for this volume has not been to produce a Festschrift in honor of David Bohm (worthy an undertaking as that would have been) or to gather together a collection of papers simply stating uncritically Bohm's views on quantum mechanics. The central theme around which the essays in this volume are arranged is David Bohm's version of quantum mechanics. It has by now become fairly standard practice to refer to his theory as Bohmian mechanics and to the larger conceptual framework within which this is located as the causal quantum theory program.

This is a monograph on geometrical and topological features which arise in quantum field theory. It is well known that when a chiral fermion interacts with a gauge field we have chiral anomaly which corresponds to the fact that divergence of the axial vector current does not vanish. It is observed that this is related to certain topological features associated with the fermion and leads to the realization of the topological origin of fermion number as well as the Berry phase. The role of gauge fields in the quantization procedure has its implications in these topological features of a fermion and helps us to consider a massive fermion as a soliton (skyrrnion). In this formalism chiral anomaly is found to be responsible for mass generation. This has its relevance in electroweak theory where it is observed that weak interaction gauge bosons attain mass topologically.

Practical scriptwriting - work alongside me. Feedback encouraged!

Particles with fractional statistics interpolating between bosons and fermions have attracted considerable interest from mathematical physicists. In recent years it has emerged that these so-called anyons have rather unexpected applications, such as the fractional Hall effect, anyonic excitations in films of liquid helium, and high-temrperature superconductivity. Furthermore, they are discussed also in the context of conformal field theories. This book is a systematic and pedagogical introduction that considers the subject of anyons from many different points of view. In particular, the author presents the relation of anyons to braid groups and Chern-Simons field theory and devotes three chapters to physical applications. The book, while being of interest to researchers, primarily addresses advanced students of mathematics and physics.

For the past five years, my editor at Springer-Verlag has asked me to write a second edition of this text that would incorporate new material on the quark model. Because this is a subject at the forefront of modern physics, whose central ideas are perpetually in flux, such an addition is not a simple task. Nevertheless, I have tried to discuss quark model topics that should stand the test of time and be of interest to introductory advanced quantum mechanics students as examples of the Feynman diagram technique.