This is the homepage for the Hilary term 2024 part of the C6 option.
Lectures will be in-person according to the standard C6 schedule , all in the DWB lecture theatre. Tutorial classes are in weeks 4,6,8.
Topics to be covered are:
1. Classical field theory
2. Symmetries of the action. Noether's theorem
3. Spontaneous symmetry breaking. Goldstone's theorem
4. Canonical quantization of fields
5. Interacting quantum fields
6. Feynman diagrams
7. Path integrals in quantum field theory
8. Examples of interacting quantum field theories
Lecture notes
Introductory lecture notes Intro
The main notes are below
Part 1, Classical Field Theory
Part 2, Canonical Quantization
Part 3: Interacting QFTs (there is also an older version of these notes that takes a somewhat less precise but perhaps more intuitive approach: Part 3, Interacting QFTs (old version) )
There are also some brief notes summarising some material that will be assumed background knowledge in the lectures, but which might be worth reviewing: background
In these short notes, I provide a slightly more direct discussion of the degrees of freedom of a massless vector: vector
In these notes I provide an alternative, more precise but somewhat more abstract, discussion of the material on interacting QFTs: interacting (this also has details of the Feynman rules for complex scalars and scalar QED).
Problem Sheets
Additional probem sheet on the path integral material (no associated tutorial, but solutions will be provided after Easter) Sheet 4
Revision sheets
Revision 1 (covering Michaelmas term material)
Additional resources
Handwritten lecture notes by Prof Andrei Starinets (lecturer in previous years) are available at http://www-thphys.physics.ox.ac.uk/people/AndreiStarinets/C6-MASTER/C6-starinets-2022-2023.html covering the same material but sometimes from a slightly different perspective.
Interesting discussion of the perturbative solution of classical field equations and the connection to Feynman diagrams: https://homepages.physik.uni-muenchen.de/%7Ehelling/classical_fields.pdf
The best discussion I know about of the meaning of "breaking" a gauge symmetry: http://theory.caltech.edu/~preskill/ph230/notes2000/230Lectures27-29-Page347-402.pdf
Lecture notes for an undergraduate QFT course, possibly useful to refresh your QM background https://physics.mcmaster.ca/~cburgess/Notes/QFTUGnotes.pdf
Extensive QFT lecture notes from Timo Weigand http://www.physics.umd.edu/grt/taj/624b/WeigandQFT.pdf (I think these are very useful)
Notes describing carefully how the non-relativistic limit of QFT occurs arxiv
Recommended books: literature