Geometry, topology and quantization
The book under review is an informal mathematical introduction to various quantization procedures dealing with topological features of the classical models. A detailed chapter by chapter description will be omitted and instead this the potential reader will find below the list of contents. Nevertheless some remarks are in order. First of all, even though the book appears in Kluwer's series on ``Mathematics and Its Applications, the text does contain neither formulation nor proof of any theorem. While in the first two chapters, which contain preliminary mathematical material, this can be understood, it seems odd that the most interesting claim about the equivalence of stochastic, Klauder and geometric quantization is not put in more rigorous form. The list of references which contains almost two hundred items is relatively adequate with the only noticeable omission of the competitive book by \textit{G. Morandi} [`The role of topology in classical and quantum physics' (Springer, Berlin) (1992; Zbl 0773.57016)]. The misapplication of La\TeX\ commands (continuous interchanging the places of the displaymath and in-text formulae, extra or missing intervals, repetition of some parts of the text, misspelling of words and names) unfortunately does not enhance the appreciation of the book; the same holds for the price. In spite of these shortcomings, the book contains useful material on spinors, supersymmetry, twistor geometry, Berry phase, etc., presented in a way which some readers will appreciate. Contents: Preface. Chapter 1: Manifold and differential forms; 1.1. Manifold, 1.2. Differential forms, 1.3. Homology and cohomology, 1.4. Fibre bundles, 1.5. Characteristic classes. Chapter 2: Spinor structure and twistor geometry; 2.1. Minkowski space-time, 2.2. Spinors and spin structure, 2.3. Conformal spinors, 2.4. Supersymmetry and superspace, 2.5. Twistor geometry. Chapter 3: Quantization; 3.1. Geometric quantization, 3.2. Klauder quantization, 3.3. Stochastic quantization. Chapter 4: Quantization and gauge field; 4.1. Equivalence of stochastic, Klauder and geometric quantization, 4.2. Gauge theoretic extension, 4.3. Locality and nonlocality in quantum mechanics, 4.4. Quantization and Berry phase. Chapter 5: Fermions and topology; 5.1. Quantization of a fermion, nonlinear sigma model and vortex line, 5.2. Quantization and anomaly, 5.3. Anomaly and topology. Chapter 6: Topological field theory; 6.1. General aspects, 6.2. Quantization, supersymmetry and topological field theory, 6.3. Geometry and topological field theory.
- `Third' quantization of vacuum Einstein gravity and free Yang-Mills theories
- scientific article; zbMATH DE number 50789 (Why is no real title available?)
- Prelude: a general overview
- scientific article; zbMATH DE number 2150812 (Why is no real title available?)
- scientific article; zbMATH DE number 896218 (Why is no real title available?)
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