I’ve come across this guide to quantum field theory textbooks. Since QFT is on my to-do list of things to learn before I die, this list may come in handy.
I’ve come across this guide to quantum field theory textbooks. Since QFT is on my to-do list of things to learn before I die, this list may come in handy.
Useful list. Do you know of any such guide anyone has written for mathematics?
There’s an interesting list for mathematics books at http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~abhishek/chicmath.htm.
Thanks for the link CZ!
There is a new QFT book by Prof. Eberhardt Zeidler from the Max-Planck Institute for Mathematics in Sciences:
http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Field-Theory-Mathematics-Mathematicians/dp/3540347623/ref=sr_1_1/104-2378082-4543916?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1177416903&sr=8-1
Its volume one of seven planned, and is intended a textbook that both pleases physicists and mathematicians. I browsed through the first volume, and found it quite ingenious. Lets hope that Prof. Zeidler, who is in retirement now, finishes the other volumes in a reasonable timeframe!
If you need to study QM before QFT I really like Sudbery’s Quantum Mechanics and the Particles of Nature: An Outline for Mathematicians. Among the highlights are an account of spin that makes sense, a really elegant treatment of the hydrogen atom that gets the energy eigenstates without having to solve PDEs using Legendre polynomials and spherical harmonics, enough group theory to at least get started on understanding the particle zoo, and a survey of ‘interpretations’ of QM.
The problem with this guide is that it is written by a physics student and it is intended for other (younger) physics students. Mathematically minded people need very different books. As somebody who also has (or at least had) QFT on that to-do list, I can share my (admittedly shallow) insights.
I liked Zee’s ‘QFT in a nutshell’ - it’s something one can even read in the bed before sleeping. Probably good for the ‘big picture’ thing. On the other end of the spectrum, there is the IAS book: ‘Quantum Fields and Strings: A Course For Mathematicians’, which is at least intended for mathematicians, although with a different meaning of the word ‘mathematician’… But probably there are useful parts of that book, and most of it is on the web (http://www.math.ias.edu/QFT/). We tried to read the part written by Witten; that is good, but more dense than it appears to be.
The guide linked quotes Zee saying that “The only person who can understand Weinberg is Weinberg”. That is probably true - you won’t learn QFT from Weinberg, you read Weinberg when you already know QFT. Physics-type people tend to like Peskin-Schroeder, but I didn’t try that one.
There are also very good lecture notes on the web, two I liked particularly are Pavel Etingof’s ‘Mathematical ideas and notions of QFT’ (http://www-math.mit.edu/~etingof/lect.ps), and Richard Borchard’s ‘Lectures on QFT’ (http://arxiv.org/abs/math-ph/0204014); both are inteded for mathematicians.
[...] Commenter h recommended Borcherd’s lecture notes on QFT. I’ve only just begun reading them, but his Life Cycle of a Theoretical Physicist, which begins the introduction, is incredibly funny. [...]