Phys 232B: Quantum Field Theory II

Spring 2021

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 paper. To make sure that you have at least a few hours of peaceful browsing through this list, the sign-up procedure will begin on Friday, March 19, at 2pm PDT. 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. (The typed-up 2-page summary is due by email, both to me and Kevin, any time before your presentation.) The precise time and day for the Discussion Sessions is still being fine-tuned, and will be announced soon. Each student will make a 15 minute presentation, plus 5 minutes for questions. Thus, each week's Discussion Session will contain 3 presentations and will be 60 minutes long.

Week of March 29 (presentations on Fri, April 2, 9:00am PDT):
[1] S. Coleman, Quantum sine-Gordon Equation as the Massive Thirring Model, Phys. Rev. D11 (1975) 2088. [Zack Weinstein]
[2] E. Witten, Nonabelian Bosonization in Two Dimensions, Comm. Math. Phys. 92 (1984) 455. [Xuyang Yu]
[3] F.D.M. Haldane, Luttinger's Theorem and Bosonization of the Fermi Surface, arXiv:hep-th/9401105. [Ella Banyas]

Week of April 5 (after swapping [6] and [8], there is no presentation this week):
[4] 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).
[5] 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.
[8] F. Cachazo, P. Svrcek and E.Witten, MHV Vertices and Tree Amplitudes in Gauge Theory, JHEP 0409 (2004) 006, arXiv:hep-th/0403047.

Week of April 12 (presentations on Fri, April 16, 9:00am PDT):
[6] J. Gordon and G.W. Semenoff, Schwinger Pair Production: Explicit Localization of the World-line Instanton, arXiv:1612.05909. [Ben Concepcion]
[7] E. Witten, Perturbative Gauge Theory as a String Theory in Twistor Space, Commun. Math. Phys. 252 (2004) 189, arXiv:hep-th/0312171. [Carl Marth]
[9] 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. [Orion Ning]

Week of April 19 (presentations on Fri, April 23, 10:00am PDT):
[10] K.J. Costello, Renormalisation and the Batalin-Vilkovisky Formalism, arXiv:0706.1533. [Ivan Burbano]
[11] Z. Bern, J.J.M. Carrasco and H. Johansson, New Relations for Gauge-Theory Amplitudes, arXiv:0805.3993. [Ryan Roberts]
[12] Z. Bern, J.J.M. Carrasco and H. Johansson, Perturbative Quantum Gravity as a Double Copy of Gauge Theory, arXiv:1004.0476. [Bethany Suter]

Week of April 26 (presentations on Fri, April 30, 10:00am PDT):
[13] R. Dijkgraaf and E. Witten, Topological Gauge Theories and Group Cohomology, Comm. Math. Phys. 129 (1990) 393. [Andres Franco Valiente]
[14] N. Arkani-Hamed and J. Kaplan, On Tree Amplitudes in Gauge Theory and Gravity, JHEP 0804 (2008) 076, arXiv:0801.2385. [Kyle Ritchie]
[15] N. Arkani-Hamed, F. Cachazo and J. Kaplan, What is the Simplest Quantum Field Theory?, JHEP 1009 (2010) 016, arXiv:0808.1446. [Juan Carlos Carrasco]

Week of May 3 (presentations on Fri, May 7, 9:30am PDT):
[16] W. Goldberger and I. Rothstein, An Effective Field Theory of Gravity for Extended Objects, arXiv:hep-th/0409156. [Kai-Isaak Ellers]
[17] J.J.M. Carrasco, M.P. Hertzberg and L. Senatore, The Effective Field Theory of Cosmological Large Scale Structures, arXiv:1206.2926. [Jose Soria]
[18] S. Carroll, S. Leichenauer and J. Pollack, A Consistent Effective Theory of Long-Wavelength Cosmological Perturbations, arXiv:1310.2920. [Matthew Self]

Week of May 10:
[19] S. Coleman and F. De Luccia, Gravitational Effects on and of Vacuum Decay, Phys. Rev. D21 (1980) 3305. [Evan Deddo]
[20] N. Arkani-Hamed and J. Trnka, The Amplituhedron, JHEP 10 (2014) 030, arXiv:1312.2007. [Noah Sailer]
[21] H. Kleinert and X.-J. Chen, Boltzmann Distribution and Market Temperature, Physica A383 (2007) 513. [Matt Tao]

horava@berkeley.edu