Bøger af Édouard Brézin

Knowledge of the renormalization group and field theory is a key part of physics, and is essential in condensed matter and particle physics. Written for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students, this textbook provides a concise introduction to this subject. The textbook deals directly with the loop expansion of the free energy, also known as the background field method. This is a powerful method, especially when dealing with symmetries, and statistical mechanics. In focussing on free energy, the author avoids long developments on field theory techniques. The necessity of renormalization then follows.

This is a first book to show that the theory of the Gaussian random matrix is essential to understand the universal correlations with random fluctuations and to demonstrate that it is useful to evaluate topological universal quantities.