{"id":181,"date":"2005-04-12T10:29:04","date_gmt":"2005-04-12T14:29:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=181"},"modified":"2017-10-14T15:16:54","modified_gmt":"2017-10-14T19:16:54","slug":"new-quantum-field-theory-textbook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=181","title":{"rendered":"New Quantum Field Theory Textbook"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I recently ran across a very good new quantum field theory textbook in the bookstore. It&#8217;s called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.springeronline.com\/sgw\/cda\/frontpage\/0,11855,5-10100-22-29181097-0,00.html\">Quantum Field Theory: A Modern Perspective<\/a> and is by my ex-Columbia colleague <a href=\"http:\/\/mail.sci.ccny.cuny.edu\/~vpn\/\">V. Parameswaran Nair<\/a>, who is now at City College nearby.<\/p>\n<p>The first half of the book covers the sort of standard  material about perturbative quantum field theory that appears in pretty much all quantum field theory books, including Peskin and Schroeder&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/departments.weber.edu\/physics\/schroeder\/qftbook.html\">An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory<\/a> which seems to be the most popular one these days.  But the second half of Nair&#8217;s new book very much does live up to his &#8220;Modern Perspective&#8221; subtitle, containing a wealth of important material that anyone learning quantum field theory should know about, but that has not made it into the standard textbooks until now.  This includes a very geometrical approach to gauge fields, anomalies and the index theorem, material on the WZW model and 2d fermion determinants, as well as an introduction to important non-perturbative ideas such as dual superconductivity and the 1\/N expansion.  Finally, Nair also includes a wonderful final chapter on the ideas behind geometric quantization and their application to the quantization of the Chern-Simons-Witten model.<\/p>\n<p>I highly recommend the book for anyone who wants to seriously learn quantum field theory.  Even if you&#8217;ve studied the subject already using a book like Peskin and Schroeder,  the additional material in Nair&#8217;s book makes it well worth reading.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I recently ran across a very good new quantum field theory textbook in the bookstore. It&#8217;s called Quantum Field Theory: A Modern Perspective and is by my ex-Columbia colleague V. Parameswaran Nair, who is now at City College nearby. The &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=181\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=181"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9673,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181\/revisions\/9673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}