My notes (423 pages, 6″x9″) from the fall 2018 session of the University of Toronto Quantum Field Theory I course (PHY2403), taught by Prof. Erich Poppitz, are now available on amazon.com (through kindle-direct-publishing, formerly createspace).
These notes are available in three forms, two free, and one paper:
- On amazon (kindle-direct-publishing) for $11 USD,
- As a free PDF,
- As latex sources (, makefiles, figures, …) to build/modify yourself.
This book is dedicated to dad.
Warning to students
These notes are no longer redacted and include whatever portions of the problem set 1-4 solutions I completed, errors and all. In the event that any of the problem sets are recycled for future iterations of the course, students who are taking the course (all mature grad students pursuing science for the love of it, not for grades) are expected to act responsibly, and produce their own solutions, within the constraints provided by the professor.
Topics
The official course outline included:
- Introduction: Energy and distance scales; units and conventions. Uncertainty relations in the relativistic domain and the need for multiple particle description.
- Canonical quantization. Free scalar field theory.
- Symmetries and conservation laws.
- Interacting fields: Feynman diagrams and the S matrix; decay widths and phase space.
- Spin 1/2 fields: Spinor representations, Dirac and Weyl spinors, Dirac equation. Quantizing fermi fields and statistics.
- Vector fields and Quantum electrodynamics.