QFT Literature

QFT literature is vast. Here I will mention some books and papers I came across in my career, which I found useful and which may be useful to you. This is work in progress.

Books

Books written by high-energy physicists:

• Peskin-Schroeder (1995) - probably the standard modern introduction to QFT. This was my main reference when I was learning the subject. Path integral approach. Mostly perturbative physics (but including all building blocks of the SM). I would probably still recommend it as a starting point for a newcomer. Missing: EFT (e.g. pion Lagrangians). Best entry-level textbook
• Weinberg vols. 1,2 (1995) - this is the fundamental , encyclopedic reference. Not good for a first intro to the subject, but once you stumble on a tricky point, you can be certain Weinberg explains it. One interesting point is that this book does not postulate path integral approach, but builds quantum fields as packages needed to generate relativistic S-matrices. I.e. it shows that quantum fields are inevitable. Weinberg has been around for a while, but this book is very modern. It treats effective field theory in depth. Best encyclopedic reference
• Weinberg vol. 3 about SUSY (2000) - universally considered not as essential as the first two volumes, even if you care about SUSY (in part because Weinberg chooses non-standard 4-component spinor notation), this book has at least one highlight: as far as I know it's the only place apart from the original paper where the proof of the Coleman-Mandula theorem is explained.
• Polyakov "Gauge fields and strings" (1987) - unique and very personal perspective on how one should think about quantum fields (and strings) from a giant of theoretical physics. A gem.
• Zinn-Justin
• Georgi "Weak interactions and modern particle theory" (1998). It's one of the few books which lucidly explain the concepts of effective field theory and matching, from particle physics perspective. Recommended.

A selection of older books by high-energy physicists:

• Itzykson-Zuber
• T.D.Lee
• Landau-Lifshitz vol.4

Mathematical physics books:

• Glimm and Jaffe "Quantum physics. Path integral point of view" From time to time you want to go see how mathematicians think about QFT problems most physicists find hopeless to justify rigorously. And more than once I found useful insights learned from this book. Unfortunately fishing for these insights is not an easy game, as the book is highly mathematical.
• Streater and Wightman "PCT, spin statistics and all that" The place to start learning about the analytic structure of QFT correlation functions.
• Haag "Local quantum physics"

Cond-mat/stat-phys books:

• Cardy "Scaling and renormalization in statistical physics" This is one of my favorite books overall. Incredible source of physical intuition in just 200 pages.
• Patashinski, Pokrovski "Fluctuation theory of phase transitions". A book for real physicists.
• Mussardo (1+1)
• Tsvelik
• Sachdev
• Fradkin

Conformal field theory:

• Di Francesco, Mathieu, Sénéchal ("the yellow book") About CFT in 2d