Quantum Field Theory III

• Lectures: Mondays and Wednesdays, 14.00pm to 15.30pm, seminar room 0.03 of the new theory building
• Tutorials: Thursdays, 10.00am to 11.30am, seminar room of the THP, old building
• The lecture is given by Prof. Dr. Alexander Altland; exercise sessions are given by Dr. Dmitry Bagrets (e-mail: dbagrets) and Dr. Abhishek Roy (e-mail: aroy). All e-mail addresses are @thp.uni-koeln.de.

Lectures start on Monday, April 11th, 2016. Tutorials start one week later, i.e. April 21st

If you would like to be included into the e-mail list, please send a message to Dr. Dmitry Bagrets

Overview

• differential geometric foundations
• introduction to topology in QFT
• topological excitations in field theories and their description in terms of theta-, Wess-Zumino, and Chern-Simons terms
• topological lattice gauge theory
• applications in the physics of vortex matter, Quantum-Hall effects, topological insulators, spin liquids, relativistic fermion matter, and others

Prerequisites

This course is the continuation of QFTI & QFTII courses. One should be familiar with the second quantization, path integrals for bosonic & fermionic fields, Matsubara technique, renormalization group (RG) etc.

Exercise sheets

Exercise sheets can be downloaded below.

• Exercise sheet 1: Discussed on 21.04.2016 Solutions
• Exercise sheet 2: Discussed on 28.04.2016 Solutions
• Exercise sheet 3: Discussed on 12.05.2016 Solutions
• Exercise sheet 4: Discussed on 2.06.2016 Solutions (taken from Ref.[6])
• Exercise sheet 5: Discussed on 9.06.2016
• Exercise sheet 6: Discussed on 16.06.2016
• Exercise sheet 7: Discussed on 23.06.2016
• Exercise sheet 8: Discussed on 7.07.2016
• Exercise sheet 9: Discussed on 14.07.2016
• Exercise sheet 10: Discussed on 15.07.2016

Lecture notes

• Part I.
• Part II.
• Part III.

Literature

1. A. Altland and B. Simons, "Condensed Matter Field Theory", 2nd edition, Cambridge University Press (2010)
2. X. G. Wen, "Quantum Field Theory of Many-body Systems", Oxford University Press (2004)
3. L. H. Ryder, "Quantum Field Theory", Cambridge University Press (1985)
4. P. Di Francesco, P. Mathieu, D. Sénéchal, "Confromal Field Theory", Springer (1997)
5. S. Sachdev, "Quantum Phase Transitions", 2nd Edition, Cambridge University Press (2011)
6. E. Fradkin, "Field Theories of the Condensed Matter Physics", 2nd Edition, Cambridge University Press (2013)
7. M. Nakahara, "Geometry, Topology and Physics", 2nd Edition, Institute of Physics Publishing (2003)
8. T. Frankel, "The Geometry of Physics", Cambridge University Press (1997)