Recent Readings

Recently I am studying Quantum Field Theory (QFT).

Last month I started to read Peksin & Schroeder. My feeling on the text is sloppy. Many places it just MENTIONS facts rather than giving a logical explanation to the point. Such as Lorentz group, it just mentions its similarity to SO(3) group and give the expression for the commutation relatition. To me, this is very unsatisfactory. I gave up this text when I finish chapter 4.

Then I read Weinbery (Vol.1). I've only studied the first 2 chapters. Chapter 1 mentions briefly the history of quantum electrodynamics from 1920's to 60's. Chapter 2 deals with Lorentz Group. It uses a lot of language of Lie gorup and Lie algebra, which I'm not very familiar with. So I forsook the text afterwards. (PS: Many people find Weinberg texts, no matter what topic, quite advanced compared with others)

I was delighted to read more history of QFT after reading Weinberg. Then Schweber's book - QED: the Men Who Made It attracts my attention. It's a thick book. And actually I found it boring after reading a few pages. But nevertheless I have gained something, not the history but an QFT text - An Introductino to Relativistic Quantum Field Theory, which author is Schweber as well. In my view, this text is much better than those I've read beforehand. It mentions the most necessary part of the theory and leaves less important or un-related staff to reference, which readers can check out if they're interested. This is a nice text, especially to beginners in QFT. I cannot find the English eBook version on the eMule network. So I check out amazon and buy one. It only costs HK$170, which is not quite expensive. For unknown reason, this text is not very common in the QFT community. Maybe it's first issued in 1961 and people may find it out-dated. But accidentally I have found it in the library. Haha~

Now I should have an overall picture of the theory:

• Classical Field Theory (Lagrangian Formalism)
  
• Symmetry (Commutation relations, spin)
• Canonical Quantization (To quantize classical fields)
  
• Interacting fields
• Feynman Path Integral Method
• Renormalization
  

In order to understand more about classical field theory, I started to study Burgess' Classical Covariant Fields, besides Schweber. It provides a modern view of classical field that is highly related to QFT. This allows me to skip the classic text by Goldstein, which saves me some time.

Below is a list of QFT texts:

• Peskin & Schroeder - Introduction to QFT
• Ryder - QFT
• Mandl - QFT
• Maggiore - A modern Introduction to QFT
• Greiner Series
• Brown - QFT
• Ramond - Field Theory: A Modern Primer
• Zee - QFT in a nutshell
• Bjorken - Advanced QM
• Bjorken - Advanced Quantum Field
• Dyson - Advanced Quantum Mechanics

A few side readings related to QFT:

• Schwinger - Particles, Sources and Fields
  (relate source theory to field theory)
  
• Feynman - Feynman Lectures on Gravitation
  (Field approach to gravitation)

I hope these may serve as a useful reference for those who want to study QFT by themselves.