Quantum Field Theory and Condensed Matter

Ramamurti Shankar is the John Randolph Huffman Professor of Physics at Yale University, Connecticut, with a research focus in theoretical condensed matter physics. He has held positions at the Aspen Center for Physics, the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has also been a Visiting Professor at several universities including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, New Jersey, University of California, Berkeley and Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. Recipient of both the Harwood Byrnes and Richard Sewell Teaching Prize at Yale University (2005) and the Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society (2009), he has also authored several books: Principles of Quantum Mechanics (1994), Basic Training in Mathematics (2008), and Fundamentals of Physics Volume I and Volume II (2014 and 2016).

• Preface; 1. Thermodynamics and statistical mechanics review; 2. Ising model in d = 0 and d = 1; 3. Statistical to quantum mechanics; 4. Quantum to statistical mechanics; 5. Feynman path integral; 6. Coherent state path integrals for spins, bosons and fermions; 7. The two-dimensional Ising model; 8. Exact solution of the two-dimensional Ising model; 9. Majorana fermions; 10. Gauge theories; 11. The renormalization group; 12. Critical phenomena: the puzzle and resolution; 13. RG for the ϕ4 model; 14. Two views of renormalization; 15. RG for non-relativistic fermions: I; 16. RG for non-relativistic fermions: II; 17. Bosonization I: the fermion-boson dictionary; 18. Bosonization II: selected applications; 19. Duality and triality; 20. Techniques for the QHE; Index.

'The study of minimally complicated models is … central to the field of condensed-matter physics. Those models, and the tools needed to understand them, are the subject of Ramamurti Shankar's new book, Quantum Field Theory and Condensed Matter: An Introduction. What is different about Shankar's text? For one thing, it is shorter [than his competitors]. Accordingly, Shankar's book is less ambitious in its aim and more selective in its content. That makes it both a more introductory text and a friendlier read. It will be a good textbook for a one-semester first-year graduate course.' Mike Stone, Physics Today