| Dates |
Sources |
Comments |
| 24th Aug. - 15th Sept. |
Zee, Chapters I - IV
Zee, Appendix B
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You may recall that this is part two of a two-part course. In particular, those chapters of Zee's book were covered in part one, and so I will be assuming that you've been catching up on reading those parts, if you have gotten rusty in those aspects.
You are to remind yourself (or learn) the aspects of group theory (particularly Lie groups) to be found in this appendix.
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| 9th Sept. |
Zee, Chapters III.1-III.3
Zee, Appendix D
Ryder, Appendix 9.A, and 9.B
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Read and Digest these chapters on Renormalization (etc) as though they are your life story. We've done the hard work of computing the integrals...this is the physics.....Be prepared to have a dicussion about any aspect of this topic in the coming class!
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| 28th Sept. |
Peskin pp541-543 |
This is an excellent discussion of "anti-screening" in non-Abelian gauge theory, explaining how the vacuum polarization effects can contrive to *increase* the strength of the charge of a source (and hence the physical gauge coupling) with increasing distance!
Your mission is to read this, and come armed to discuss it in class. Your contributions to the discussion **will matter** as usual.
|
| 5th Oct. |
Zee, IV.2 |
The Poin as a Nambu-Goldstone Boson |
| 12th Oct. |
Good books on critical phenomena |
The Landau-Ginzburg theory is very important in the classical theory of critical phenomena. It is worthwhile taking the time to learn a bit of the history of this subject, if you care. Have a look in various books, such as H. E. Stanley, "Introduction to Phase Transitions and Critical Phenomena", (Oxford). |
| 26th Oct. |
Important!
Make sure that you can do all the work on the in-class soliton handout/worksheet that I gave out today. All of you performed unexpectedly dismally on it, so make sure that you can do it. Find it here.
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I'm serious. You need to be able to do these simple manipulations....following the lectures like they're a movie is not good enough. |
| 28th Oct. |
Important!
Make sure that you can do all the work on the in-class magnetic monopole (part 1) handout/worksheet that I gave out today. All of you performed unexpectedly dismally on it, so make sure that you can do it. Find it here.
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See Above! |
| 2nd Nov. |
Important!
Make sure that you can do all the work on the in-class magnetic monopole (part 2) handout/worksheet that I gave out today. Find it here.
|
See above. |
| 4th Nov. |
Important!
Make sure that you can do all the work on the in-class magnetic monopole (part 3) handout/worksheet that I gave out today. Find it here.
|
See above. |
| 9th and 11th Nov |
Check some fo the steps in the instanton analysis. Did you understand/like the topological term that counts winding number?
Also, see below....
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| 16-18th Nov. |
Ryder/Peskin for the role of anomalies and instantons in the Standard Model
Read about 't Hooft and the U(1) problem. Write a 3 page essay. See homework page.
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| 23rd Nov. |
Zee VII.4
(Appreciate his discussion of powers of N in the action and diagrammatics.)
'tHooft's original papers on large N
(appreciate especially the topological aspect of the expansion)
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