Customer Reviews

A Modern Introduction to Quantum Field Theory (Oxford Master Series in Statistical, Computational, and Theoretical Physics)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
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2 star:		(1)
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This book is short and to the point. The author has a good sense for the heart of the subject and how to present it in an efficient way. I would recommend this book to anybody who wants to either a.) learn the meat of QFT quickly or b.) wants a good reference which quickly reviews the most important parts of QFT. Since the technical details are important, I would highly recommend using this book in conjunction with a book with more technical details like the one by Peskin and Schroeder. (However, this book does have a lot of good information for its size.) Reading this book will help catalyze your understanding of the details in a more technical book.

This book presents the basics of QFT in a form that is very understandable. The author starts by presenting Lie algebra, which is used to justify spinors. A spinor Lagrangian then creates the Dirac equation. This approach makes the Dirac equation seem as natural as the Maxwell equation. I have previously seen two other books that took the approach of taking Schrodinger's equation and relativity and mashing the two together using Pauli matrices as glue. That never sat well with me and I was glad to see some justification. The clear, consistent, modern notation was a great help - I have seen other books that mix Einstein notation with bold-face 4-vectors using dot products, etc. I also found it helpful to have a concise book to introduce the concepts without getting bogged down in examples with equations spanning the entire page (this book does however have examples at the end of the chapters).

The next chapters introduce quantization, perturbation theory, non-abelian theories, etc. I only got through half the book as it was just some summer reading for me, but paging through the latter half makes me look forward to having the time to finish it.

I like the approach of this book in the sense that it first treats groups and the transformations that comprise representations of the groups. Then it moves to the construction of various spinor fields. Only once the full equipment of transformations on these fields has been explained, does the book move into Lagrangian field theory. Then, finally, it treats the quantization of the fields. For a first field theory text (which this is for me) I like this approach because it shows the more exciting and exotic material at the very beginning.

Though I like the broad arrangement of the material, individual sections can be a bit obtuse from time to time. They are very dense and frequently seek to explain things in the most general sense, even when the most general sense is not the clearest or most intuitive.

This book is the quickest way to learn a lot of qft at a deep level. If you are an advanced undergraduate (taken all the required undergrad courses and have sufficient math background) that is wanting to learn QFT, this is the best resource. If you tried reading peskin, but couldn't get past the first few pages of chapter 2, check this book out. I found it a pleasure to read, and all the concepts were explained in a way that I found to be the most comprehensible. Additionally it has solutions to all the problems in the book. I suppose the only downside of this book is that there is not a lot of material which is both a strength and a weakness. Because the book is so small it's less intimidating, but at the same time a lot of advanced material is left out(e.g. anomalies and ghost fields). For a grad course the book could be covered in a semester. I highly recommend this book to start off learning qft.

With this excellent book the path that a cultivated layman should follow to fulfill his noble attempt to familiarize himself with QFT is firmly traced. He (or of course She) should first read David Griffiths' book, "Introduction to Elementary Particles" to acquire a general idea of what QFT is all about. Having done so, in a Landau scale 1 to 10, he will now be at level 9. He should then read Maggiore's book aiming for an incomparably deeper understanding of the field that will catapult him to level 5 (keep in mind that Landau placed himself at level three!). About Maggiore's book: The author in chapter two, about Lie, Lorentz, Poincaré groups, and representations, warns the reader that its understanding will not be a picnic.
It is however apparent that the author has done the best (as also in the sections concerning Noether's theorem, Spinor fields and Dirac Equation, Lehmann-Symanzik-Zimmermann -reduction formula, Path Integral Quantization....) to clarify difficult issues. At the aimed level of the book I think that it was a good idea to limit the discussions to the low energy approximation of the electroweak theory, and to expound only the two main ingredients of the Standard Model, namely Yang-Mills theories and the Higgs mechanism.
The best introductory book on the field in my opinion.

This book is interesting, but it is not an introduction. It is merely a summary of results. Do not expect to *understand* QFT from this book. Do not expect any justification other than "intuitively, we see that", or "obviously, we have ...".