No label defined (Q4792123)

This is a quite unusual book on quantum field theory which reflects in many respects the authors deep personal insight into the subject. The most relevant difference to other textbooks is its consistent treatment of field theories in curved spacetimes and, more generally, of systems with (geometrically and topologically) nontrivial configuration spaces, right from the beginning. In this context the author follows a manifestly covariant point of view which does not require a distinguished split of spacetime into space and time as in the canonical approach -- this is the fact to which the term ``global'' in the title refers to. As a consequence of this, a lot of material which is of central importance in ordinary textbooks, like representation theory of the Poincaré group, plays only a minor role in the present monograph. As a second distinguishing feature, all general statements are usually done for fields which take their values in a supermanifold, i.e. they can have commuting and anti-commuting components. Spacetime itself however is always modeled by an ordinary manifold (i.e. no non-commuting coordinates). Hence supergravity is not included. The book refers to several non-trivial mathematical concepts like fiber bundles, manifolds of sections, and related topological notions. However, it is not a book about mathematics or mathematical physics. Hence a precise mathematical description of quantum field theory and a discussion of related conceptual problems is not given. The work consists of 35 chapters, distributed over seven parts. A supplementary eighth part contains 25 elementary examples which illustrate the constructions and procedures developed in the rest of the book. It is indeed very useful to study them in parallel to the other parts of the book. The first part (chapters 1--6) discusses classical field theory. The most remarkable object introduced here is the Peierls bracket -- a covariant version of the canonical Poisson bracket -- which is of central importance for the rest of the book. Part II (chapters 7--12) is a short survey on quantum theory in general. Apart from the Schwinger variational principle and Feynman integrals -- the main tools used later-on for quantization -- it contains a brief discussion of the measuring process and the foundations of quantum mechanics. Some readers might dislike this part because it is based on the ``many-world'' interpretation of quantum mechanics (which is under dispute to say the least). In part III (chapters 13--16) technical tools to calculate and approximate Feynman integrals are discussed and in part IV (chapters 17--22) the formalism is applied to linear fields. Here Bose, Fermi and Maxwell fields are studied on spacetimes which are stationary or which have stationary ``in'' and ``out'' regions. The general non-stationary case and its difficulties concerning ambiguous vacuum and particle concepts is only briefly discussed. This is a pity because this is one major issue for quantum field theories in curved spacetimes. Even more unfortunate is the fact that no references to the vast literature on this subject are given. Note that this is a problem all over the book: The number of references given is in general unsatisfactory. Part V (chapters 23--26) turns to interacting fields. It contains a discussion of perturbation theory and renormalization, and of the general formalism of gauge theories. Part VI (chapters 27--31), entitled ``Tools for quantum field theory. Applications.'' contains a mixture of several topics including: the heat kernel, anomalies, and particle production due to nontrivial geometry (e.g. Unruh and Hawking effect). The final seventh part (``Special topics'', chapters 32--35) discusses: Euclidean quantum field theory, discreet symmetries, QED, Yang-Mills theory and gravity. Summarizing, one can say that this is an interesting work which contains a lot of material which is not contained in ordinary textbooks (mainly geometrical and topological issues) and which provides at many places an unusual point of view. It can be recommended for readers with some prior knowledge in quantum field theory, but not for beginners, because some basic material is treated only very briefly and the provided generality can be confusing for the unexperienced reader.