Customer Reviews

Quantum Theory of Many-Particle Systems (Pure & Applied Physics)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It is the best text on Green's functions, especially if you are a kind of person who really reads through books trying to figure the things out. Probably the only book which succeeds in promoting analytic continuation for newcomers (although I also recomment appendix in the book by Kadanoff&Baym): it seems like many people get impression of this being a topic of secondary importance, whereas it is the conerstone of the imaginary time techniques.
I also recommend Abrikosov et al. as a classic and a good sample of how the things are done in majority of the papers (and the Dover edition is really cheap).
Sorry for Mahan, as it makes a good reference book, but not a book you can learn from.
I found that more practical people give preference to the book by Jauho and Haug- it is not a bad one, has Keldysh technique, and containes useful references to important review papers.
Finally, I recommend the book by Negele and Orland as a more modern look at "many-body physics" as it is versus "Green's functions books".

Very well written and with a comprehensive explanation of the basics of advanced quantum theory. This is the place for understanding about computing propagators and Feynman diagrams to arbitrary order.

Plus, the Dyson equation! At last, you can find out what made Freeman Dyson famous amongst physicists. You can decide whether this ranks in importance to Feynman's and Schwinger's discoveries.

The problem sets are nontrivial. Which will be appreciated by you, AFTER you have attempted them. (Whilst you are in an allnighter, trying to finish a problem set, your opinion may differ!)

The book does not cover superstrings, because those came after its publication.

I find F&W's writing lucid and their math clear. it's more fleshed out than a text like mahan. the only drawback is that it's old fashioned. hbar isnt 1 like many authors.

so I would get this over abrikosov et al, and you'd need another text if you wanted to learn about path integral techniques, but pound for pound (and considering that dover reprints are cheap) it holds its own.

it's good for bosons (BEC stuff these days), and superconductors, weak on interacting fermions bc it focused on the nuclear problem instead of metals.

This book is one of the most famous textbooks for the many
particle theory. I like it and recommend to anyone who studies
many particle theory for the first time. But, I should make some
comments on this book. First, this book does not contain any
descriptions for the path integral method, which is now very
popular in the field of many particle theory and is compactly
explained in Negele and Orland. Second, applications seems to be
somewhat old. This is inevitable and not author's fault. For
example, modern nuclear theory goes far beyond the RPA. Third,
authors focused on the perturbational expansion of the Green's
function and did not give explanations how to use the Feynman
diagrams to calculate the energy corrections for the fermion
systems, which is found in March, Raimes and Gross.

Anyway, this is a good book. I hope everyone likes it!

The Fetter and Walecka is an excellent introductory read on many-body quantum mechanics. It slowly introduces new concepts, beginning from the basics of second quantization, and proceeds through the entire theory using Wick's theorem and second-quantized methods. The section on examples gives the book a nice general appeal. As a condensed matter physicist, I can focus on getting the basic examples given in my section down, while still getting a good sampling of other branches of physics in a well-written way.

Although it should not be the end of one's study of many-body quantum mechanics, it should certainly be the beginning. The Abrikosov, although very thorough and covering a wide range of topics, is written more as a list of results than as a text to learn from. Furthermore, one would probably want to hunt down a text like the Schulman "Methods and Applications of Path Integration" or the Negele "Quantum Many-Particle Systems" to see the imaginary time and path integral formulations of these topics.

It is exactly what I was looking for. It is a great book in QFT. I like the amazon's service too.

Very clear exposition of S-Matrix theory. Unfortunately, it is hard to find all the pieces in any one text; even for just these few points, it is worth picking up the text just for those few sections that clearly derive the formalism.

This book is definitely a good start to study quantum field theory. To read this book, the reader must be already acquainted with single body quantum theory, perturbation theory and the symmetrization principles. The text is formal and somewhat old-fashioned, but very complete : every step of every calculation is justified. Although the style might not be the most pedagogical you can find, everything the reader needs to know is included in the book, which makes it easy to progress. Relevant and realistic examples of many-body systems are presented throughout the book to illustrate the theoretical concepts. If you plan to do a lot of work on quantum many-body systems, you should have this book : it is a very good reference and it is not expensive. This should not prevent the reader, however, from looking at more modern references.

This is a graduate level textbook, but some chapters may be relevant to an undergraduate student doing an internship in the field, or that is simply curious!

Benjamin D'Anjou
Physics Major
Université de Sherbrooke

Very consistent and easy to learn book. I like this book much more than famous one by Abrikosov,Gorkov, Dzyaloshinskii.

This book is a clever and classical textbook for physics graduates who wish to go beyond the one particle quantum mechanics. Its many problems helps establishing the concepts of field theory.