Phys 232B: Quantum Field Theory II

Spring 2022

List of Reading Assignments

Here is our list of Reading Assignments for the 232B course this year. Each student who is officially registered for the course will select one of the available papers. You will sign up for your selected paper by email to me, and I will assign the papers on the first-come, first-served basis, confirming hopefully by an immediate return email whether you have been assigned to your chosen paper. To make sure that you have at least a couple of peaceful days browsing through this list, the sign-up procedure will begin on Wednesday, March 9, at 12 noon PST, exactly. Please do not send me your selections by email before this "end-of-moratorium" time, in the interest of fairness I will have to ignore all premature requests.

Once your Reading Assignment has been confirmed by me, you will read the paper, eventually type a 2-page summary, and then present the main ideas of the paper in the Discussion Session presentation during the indicated week. Each student will make a 20 minute presentation (with laptop and a projector, in our regularly scheduled Discussion Session, in our usual room 402 Physics South), plus 5 minutes for questions. Note that the final three presentations will be during RRR week, in the time and place usually reserved for our Tuesday morning lecture.

I was originally planning to start the presentations just before Spring break. However, this could possibly disadvantage those few students who would present early, and would not have enough time to read the paper. I have decided that by a simple reorganization of our schedule, it will be possible to make things more equitable for everyone: Thus, our presentations will start the week after Spring break, hopefully giving everyone enough time to study their assignment and prepare the presentation. The final Discussion Session before Spring break will instead be devoted to a free discussion of all topics QFT.

Thu, March 31, 3:40-4:30pm:
[1] S. Coleman, Quantum sine-Gordon Equation as the Massive Thirring Model, Phys. Rev. D11 (1975) 2088. [Digvijay Roy Varier]
[2] F.D.M. Haldane, Luttinger's Theorem and Bosonization of the Fermi Surface, arXiv:hep-th/9401105. [Malte Schwarz]

Thu, April 7, 3:40-4:30pm:
[3] R. Jackiw and C. Rebbi, Spin from Isospin in a Gauge Theory, Phys. Rev. Lett. 36 (1976) 1116 (or the equivalent paper by 't Hooft and Hasenfratz in the same volume of PRL). [Serah Moldovsky]
[4] N. Seiberg, T. Senthil, C. Wang and E. Witten, A Duality Web in 2+1 Dimensions and Condensed Matter Physics, Ann. Phys. 374 (2016) 395, arXiv:1606.01989. [Kai-Isaak Ellers]

Thu, April 14, 3:40-4:30pm:
[5] F. Cachazo, P. Svrcek and E.Witten, MHV Vertices and Tree Amplitudes in Gauge Theory, JHEP 0409 (2004) 006, arXiv:hep-th/0403047. [Maximilian Detering]
[6] R. Britto, F. Cachazo, B. Feng and E. Witten, Direct Proof of Tree-Level Recursion Relation in Yang-Mills Theory, Phys. Rev. Lett. 94 (2005) 181602, arXiv:hep-th/0501152. [Radha Mastandrea]

Rescheduled to Thu, May 5, 3:40-4:30pm (from the originally planned Thu, April 21, 3:40-4:30pm):
[7] E. Witten, Perturbative Gauge Theory as a String Theory in Twistor Space, Commun. Math. Phys. 252 (2004) 189, arXiv:hep-th/0312171. [Lark Wang]
[8] D. Gaiotto, A. Kapustin, N. Seiberg and B. Willett, Generalized Global Symmetries, arXiv:1412.5148. [Matthew Self]

Thu, April 28, 3:40-4:30pm:
[9] Z. Bern, J.J.M. Carrasco and H. Johansson, Perturbative Quantum Gravity as a Double Copy of Gauge Theory, arXiv:1004.0476. [Eugene Chen]
[12] S. Carroll, S. Leichenauer and J. Pollack, A Consistent Effective Theory of Long-Wavelength Cosmological Perturbations, arXiv:1310.2920. [Sami Kaya]

NOTE THE UNUSUAL DAY AND TIME: Tue, May 3, 9:40-11:00am:
[11] J.J.M. Carrasco, M.P. Hertzberg and L. Senatore, The Effective Field Theory of Cosmological Large Scale Structures, arXiv:1206.2926. [Tsai-Chen Lee]
[10] W. Goldberger and I. Rothstein, An Effective Field Theory of Gravity for Extended Objects, arXiv:hep-th/0409156. [Samuel Weiss]
[13] H. Kleinert and X.-J. Chen, Boltzmann Distribution and Market Temperature, Physica A383 (2007) 513. [Yu-Hsuan (Eugene) Lin]

horava@berkeley.edu