Reading List

Lecture Notes on the Web:
I will not be posting mine. However, there are two much better places to look. One is from Sidney Coleman’s legendary class, with notes taken by BrianHill. These were redone in latex and posted on arXiv some years later. Another fine and less idiosyncratic set of notes is by David Tong, available from Cambridge. You can read these while you’re taking this class and then decide whether you should have done Part III instead.

Oldschool Texts:
Two classic books are by Bjorken and Drell, Relativistic Quantum Mechanics and Relativistic Quantum Fields. Everything in the first is worth knowing; the second is
somewhat outdated but still worth a look. Another old book, Quantum Field Theory, by Mandl and Shaw is a little low-level but explains the basics very clearly.
Text closest to what I will do: Peskin and Schroeder, An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory. This is still the standard in the field. It’s written from the particle physics point
of view, but in a broad-minded enough way so that it will be valuable to all.

Newer texts that many find useful:
Srednicki, Quantum Field Theory, does a good job of approaching the subject from the traditional particle-physics perspective where Lorentz
invariance comes first. Kardar, Statistical Physics of Fields, does a good job of approaching the subject from the statistical mechanics point-of-view, where one learns a lot without
needing relativity (or for that matter even quantum mechanics).