Related papers: Notes from Sidney Coleman's Physics 253a
These lectures briefly review our current understanding of classical and quantum gravity in three spacetime dimensions, concentrating on the quantum mechanics of closed universes and the (2+1)-dimensional black hole. Three formulations of…
These five lectures collect elementary facts about 4D supersymmetric theories with emphasis on N=1 supersymmetry, as well as the basic notions of supersymmetric quantum mechanics. Contents: I. From symmetries to supersymmetry; II. Basic…
A formal symmetry between generalized coordinates and momenta is postulated to formulate classical and quantum theories of a particle coupled to an Abelian gauge field. It is shown that the symmetry (a) requires the field to have dynamic…
In 1952, L\'{e}on van Hove published an article, in French, with the title ``Les difficult\'{e}s de divergences pour um mod\`{e}le particulier de champ quantifi\'{e}''. The article is frequently cited in relation to Haag's theorem and to…
These are lecture notes from my talks at the "Current Developments in Mathematics" conference (Harvard, 2006). They cover a variety of topics involving symplectic cohomology. In particular, a discussion of (algorithmic) classification…
Prepared for the Quantum Field Theory section of the Encyclopedia of Mathematical Physics, Elsevier, 2006. A brief introduction to the methodology and techniques of perturbative relativistic quantum field theory is presented.
We discuss a previously unpublished description of electromagnetism outlined by Richard P. Feynman in the 1960s in five handwritten pages, recently uncovered among his papers, and partly developed in later lectures. Though similar to the…
Notes from a course given at Oujda university, Morocco, october 2002 - march 2003 within the support of a fellowship from the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie. These notes present a brief introduction to Connes' non commutative…
These notes are an elaboration on: (i) a short course that I gave at the IPhT-Saclay in May-June 2012; (ii) a previous letter on reversibility in quantum mechanics. They present an introductory, but hopefully coherent, view of the main…
We give, for the first time, the critical complete text of a manuscript by Ettore Majorana, conserved in the same file of the lecture notes for his course on Theoretical Physics at the University of Naples. He probably refers to a seminar…
This paper analyzes the effective field theory perspective on modern physics through the lens of the quantum theory of gravitational interaction. The historical part argues that the search for a theory of quantum gravity stimulated the…
We construct a consistent quantum field theory of a dimensionally reduced self-interacting scalar field. The Kaluza-Klein dimensional reduction on the well-known $\Phi^{4}$ scalar theory, on a certain $(4+n)$ spacetime with an arbitrary…
This invited essay belongs to a series considering highly influential articles published by the International Journal of Theoretical Physics. In this paper, we highlight the physical content and the profound consequences of Richard…
This is the introduction to the section on Quantum Mechanics in the centennial collection of noteworthy articles appearing in The Physical Review and Physical Review Letters through 1983, since it all began in 1893. The selections for this…
Over the last three years, a number of fundamental physical issues were addressed in loop quantum gravity. These include: A statistical mechanical derivation of the horizon entropy, encompassing astrophysically interesting black holes as…
The fractional quantum Hall effect was experimentally discovered in 1982. It was observed that the Hall conductivity $\sigma_{yx}$ of a two-dimensional electron system is quantized, $\sigma_{yx}=e^2/3h$, in the vicinity of the Landau level…
An odd look at "standard" physics (Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Dirac) leading to a radical change of our concept of inertial motion and to new heuristic approaches of gravitation and the cosmological constant.
This paper contains applications of the quantum theory for gravity developed in the paper " A Sketch for a Quantum Theory of Gravity". Firstly, it is shown that the theory gives a direct derivation of the implications of Dirac's large…
These are course notes I wrote for my Fall 2013 graduate topics course on geometric structures, taught at ICERM. The notes rework many of proofs in William P. Thurston's beautiful but hard-to-understand paper, "Shapes of Polyhedra". A…
These notes were inspired by the course ''Quantum Field Theory from a Functional Integral Point of View'' given at the University of Zurich in Spring 2017 by Santosh Kandel. We describe Feynman's path integral approach to quantum mechanics…