Errata to the big Yellow Book of CFT

[AndreasC]

I tried and failed to find errata to this very commonly used book. However, I did succeed to find errors, including some in exercises, which is really annoying. Does anybody have any idea of where I could find errata, or possibly where I could post the errors I find so that others don't spend time being confused?

 

[Baluncore]

Does anybody have any idea of where I could find errata, or possibly where I could post the errors I find so that others don't spend time being confused?

First, check that you have the latest corrected edition.

Title: Conformal Field Theory
Author: Philippe by Di Francesco, Pierre Mathieu David Sénéchal
Year: 1996
Edition: Corrected
Publisher: Springer
Language: English
ISBN 10: 038794785X
ISBN 13: 9780387947853

You could contact Springer Help and Support: https://www.springer.com/gp/help
Ask for a copy of the errata for your edition.
Offer a list of the errors you have found.

Failing that, list the errors you have found in this thread.

 

[mad mathematician]

But it's not yellow! it's between brownish and orange, but certainly not yellow!

N.B
perhaps you should contact the authors by email, that's what I had done with other books.

 

[AndreasC]

I kinda forgot about this thread for a while, but here is one error that I just noticed. In page 337, while working out the partition function for a (Euclidean) CFT on a torus, they write the translation operator that translates by a full period in the direction of $\omega_2$ as:
$$ \exp [-(H \cdot Im \omega_2 -iP\cdot Re\omega_2)]. $$
This is correct, BUT then they write the momentum operator on a cylinder with circumference $L$ as
$$P = \frac{2\pi i}{L} (L_0-\bar{L}_0) .$$
This is WRONG, the correct expression is without the imaginary $i$. See for instance the notes of Cardy on CFT and statistical physics, or Polchinski page 209, or Ginsparg page 83 and subsection 2.2. The reason is that the dilation generator on the plane is $D=L_0+\bar{L}_0$, while the rotation generator is $\mathcal{P}=i(L_0-\bar{L}_0)$. Now consider the case of a cylinder, let's say one with $L=2\pi$ so that we can drop all the constants. Finite translation along the axis of the cylinder (Euclidean time evolutions) are given by $e^{-D}$, while finite translations around the cylinder are given by $e^{-\mathcal{P}}$. However, the convention we used above dictates that $\mathcal{P}$ is not the momentum. Rather, if we want to use the form for the translation operator used by the Yellow Book above, the momentum is $P=-i\mathcal{P}=L_0-\bar{L}_0$, and everything works out fine. Bottom line is, the correct expression should be:
$$P = \frac{2\pi }{L} (L_0-\bar{L}_0) .$$

I included this whole explanation in case someone read this in the book and went to Google to figure out what's wrong.

 

[MrWolf]

Hey guys! Sorry for jumping into the thread after so long, but I came across a link that might be of interest to you. I recently stumbled upon the personal website of one of the authors of the book — David Sénéchal — who posted two errata lists (specifically for the 1st and 2nd printings). You can find them at this link:

https://sites.google.com/view/david-senechal/autres-documents/conformal-field-theory

Hope you find them useful. Enjoy!