Quantum An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory by Michael E. Peskin

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"An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory" by Michael E. Peskin and Dan V. Schroeder is recognized as a standard textbook in quantum field theory (QFT), widely used in universities. The book is comprehensive and detailed, making it a valuable resource for mastering QFT, particularly in high energy physics. However, readers may struggle to maintain a clear understanding of the overarching concepts due to the dense formulas and intricate calculations. While the chapters on renormalization, symmetry breaking, and gauge theories are well-executed, the book has notable shortcomings, such as a poor treatment of the functional integral formalism and insufficient coverage of representation theory for groups like Lie groups and the Lorentz group. Despite its challenges, the book remains a classic and essential read for QFT enthusiasts, emphasizing calculation skills, although it contains numerous typos and foundational issues, including errors in the chapter on the renormalization group.

For those who have used this book


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This massive book on QFT is a standard text nowadays and used at many universities. The book is extensive and very detailed. If you manage to follow the text and keep up with all the nitty-gritty details, then you are well underway into mastering QFT -- but this is quite a challenge. The book is great for QFT when applied to high energy physics, but less so from a condensed matter perspective. The chapters on renormalization, symmetry breaking and gauge theories are very thorough.

It can be quite difficult to keep a bigger picture of what you are exactly doing (and why) at any given point throughout the book, as you can get easily lost in the sea of formulas and details of the calculations.

The book is lacking in some topics. For instance, the treatment of the functional integral formalism is somewhat poor. You also need to use other resources for the representation theory of groups (Lie groups and the Lorentz group in particular), because it's not really treated well here.

Still, it's already a classic and a must-read for any QFT-enthusiast.
 
It's a pretty good introduction to relativistic (vacuum) QFT. The strength is that it teaches how to calculate things, which is very important to get the idea of QFT. The drawback is the huge number of typos and some glitches in the foundations. E.g., there are dimensionful arguments in logarithms in the chapter about the renormalization group, which is kind of ironic ;-).
 
The book is fascinating. If your education includes a typical math degree curriculum, with Lebesgue integration, functional analysis, etc, it teaches QFT with only a passing acquaintance of ordinary QM you would get at HS. However, I would read Lenny Susskind's book on QM first. Purchased a copy straight away, but it will not arrive until the end of December; however, Scribd has a PDF I am now studying. The first part introduces distribution theory (and other related concepts), which...
I've gone through the Standard turbulence textbooks such as Pope's Turbulent Flows and Wilcox' Turbulent modelling for CFD which mostly Covers RANS and the closure models. I want to jump more into DNS but most of the work i've been able to come across is too "practical" and not much explanation of the theory behind it. I wonder if there is a book that takes a theoretical approach to Turbulence starting from the full Navier Stokes Equations and developing from there, instead of jumping from...

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