Related papers: Fifty years of Wilsonian renormalization and count…
"Preprint" of paper from 1989 that wasn't arxiv'ed at the time. Abstract: Our understanding of quantum field theories, and, in particular, of renomalization has changed radically in recent years; renormalization is no longer a deeply…
The renormalization group method developed by Ken Wilson more than four decades ago has revolutionized the way we think about problems involving a broad range of energy scales such as phase transitions, turbulence, continuum limits and…
A non technical introduction to the concept of renormalization is given, with an emphasis on the energy scale dependence in the description of a physical system. We first describe the idea of scale dependence in the study of a ferromagnetic…
The renormalization method is specifically aimed at connecting theories describing physical processes at different length scales and thereby connecting different theories in the physical sciences. The renormalization method used today is…
In previous work, I described several examples combining reduction and emergence: where reduction is understood a la Ernest Nagel, and emergence is understood as behaviour or properties that are novel (by some salient standard). Here, my…
In 1963-71, a group of people, myself included, formulated and perfected a new approach to physics problems, which eventually came to be known under the names of scaling, universality, and renormalization. This work formed the basis of a…
The history of renormalization is reviewed with a critical eye, starting with Lorentz's theory of radiation damping, through perturbative QED with Dyson, Gell-Mann & Low, and others, to Wilson's formulation and Polchinski's functional…
We have two aims. The main one is to expound the idea of renormalization in quantum field theory, with no technical prerequisites (Sections 2 and 3). Our motivation is that renormalization is undoubtedly one of the great ideas, and great…
I give an outline of recent applications of the renormalisation group to effective theories of nuclear forces, focussing on the use of a Wilsonian approach to analyse systems of two or three nonrelativistic particles.
This is a conceptual paper that re-examines the principles underlying the application of renormalization theory to quantum phase transitions in the light of quantum information theory. We start by describing the intuitive argument known as…
Early developments leading to renormalizable non-Abelian gauge theories for the weak, electromagnetic and strong interactions, are discussed from a personal viewpoint. They drastically improved our view of the role of field theory, symmetry…
A divergence-free approach to relativistic quantum electrodynamics based on regularisation of equations of quantum mechanics is discussed. This approach is shown to be exactly equivalent to the conventional Feynman-Dyson renormalisation…
In the half century since the 1950s computer simulation has transformed our understanding of physics. The rare, expensive, slow, and bulky mainframes of World War II have given way to today's millions of cheap, fast, desksized workstations…
A simple introduction of renormalization in quantum field theory is discussed. Explanation of concepts is emphasized instead of the technical details.
As applied to quantum theories, the program of renormalization is successful for `renormalizable models' but fails for `nonrenormalizable models'. After some conceptual discussion and analysis, an enhanced program of renormalization is…
We first review the historical developments, both in physics and in mathematics, that preceded (and in some sense provided the background of) deformation quantization. Then we describe the birth of the latter theory and its evolution in the…
Ken Wilson's ideas on the renormalization group were shaped by his attempts to build a theory of the strong interactions based on the concepts of quantum field theory. I describe the development of his ideas by reviewing four of Wilson's…
In this paper, we study renormalization, that is, the procedure for eliminating singularities, for a special model using both combinatorial techniques in the framework of working with formal series, and using a limit transition in a…
This is a very brief introduction to Wilson's Renormalization Group with emphasis on mathematical developments.
In the practice of physics model building, the process of renormalization, resummation, and anomaly cancellation is to incrementally repair initially ill-defined Lagrangian quantum field theories. Impressive as this is, one would rather…