Introduction to Many-Body Physics

Piers Coleman is a Professor in the Center for Materials Theory at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. A major contributor to the theory of interacting electrons in condensed matter, he invented the 'slave boson' approach to strongly correlated electron systems. He has a long-standing interest in highly correlated d- and f-electron materials, in novel forms of superconductivity and the unsolved problems of quantum criticality in metals.

• Introduction; 1. Scales and complexity; 2. Quantum fields; 3. Conserved particles; 4. Simple examples of second-quantization; 5. Green's functions; 6. Landau Fermi liquid theory; 7. Zero temperature Feynman diagrams; 8. Finite temperature many-body physics; 9. Fluctuation dissipation and linear response theory; 10. Electron transport theory; 11. Phase transitions and broken symmetry; 12. Path integrals; 13. Path integrals and itinerant magnetism; 14. Superconductivity and BCS theory; 15. Retardation and anisotrophic pairing; 16. Local moments and the Kondo effect; 17. Heavy electrons; 18. Mixed valence, fluctuations and topology; 19. Epilogue: the challenge of the future; Index.

'… the field has advanced tremendously since the 1960s. Subsequent decades saw great progress in addressing new many-body systems - such as those exhibiting the Kondo effect, disordered systems, superfluid helium-3, and unconventional superconductors - and the development of new tools, such as functional integrals and the renormalization group. Students and instructors of quantum many-body physics need an updated, modern textbook that covers those developments. [This book] successfully fills the need. Coleman, an eminent condensed-matter theorist at Rutgers University, covers his subject with pedagogical flair and attention to detail … A reader who has mastered the material in this excellent book should be in a strong position to take on problems that have resisted conventional solutions.' Mohit Randeria, Physics Today