Screen LibraryIntroduction to effective field theory : thinking effectively about hierarchies of scale /
"It is an everyday fact of life that Nature comes to us with a variety of scales: from quarks, nuclei and atoms through planets, stars and galaxies up to the overall Universal large-scale structure. Science progresses because we can understand each of these on its own terms, and need not unders...
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| Main Authors: | |
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| Published: |
Cambridge University Press,
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| Publisher Address: | Cambridge, United Kingdom : |
| Publication Dates: | 2021. |
| Literature type: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Subjects: | |
| Summary: |
"It is an everyday fact of life that Nature comes to us with a variety of scales: from quarks, nuclei and atoms through planets, stars and galaxies up to the overall Universal large-scale structure. Science progresses because we can understand each of these on its own terms, and need not understand all scales at once. This is possible because of a basic fact of Nature: most of the details of small distance physics are irrelevant for the description of longer-distance phenomena. Our description of Nature's laws use quantum field theories, which share this property that short distances mostly decouple from larger ones. Effective Field Theories (EFTs) are the tools developed over the years to show why they do. These tools have immense practical value: knowing which scales are important and why the rest decouple allows hierarchies of scale to be used to simplify the description of many systems. This book provides an introduction to these tools, and to emphasize their great generality illustrates them using applications from many parts of physics: relativistic and nonrelativistic; few-body and many-body."--Preface |
| Carrier Form: | xx, 641 pages : illustrations ; 26 cm |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 591-635) and index. |
| ISBN: |
9780521195478 0521195470 |
| Index Number: | QC173 |
| CLC: | O412.3 |
| Call Number: | O412.3/B955-1 |
| Contents: | Part I. Theoretical framework -- Decoupling and hierarchies of scale -- Effective actions -- Power counting and matching -- Symmetries -- Boundaries -- Time-dependent systems -- Part II. Relativistic applications -- Conceptual issues (relativistic systems) -- QCD and chiral perturbation theory -- The Standard Model as an effective theory -- General Relativity as an effective theory -- Part III. Nonrelativistic Applications -- Conceptual issues (nonrelativistic systems) -- Electrodynamics of non-relativistic particles -- First-quantized methods -- Part IV. Many-body applications -- Goldstone bosons again -- Degenerate systems -- EFTs and open systems. |