Textbook in PDF format

Over the past several years I have taught a two-semester graduate
course on quantum field theory at the University of Rochester. In this
course the ideas of quantum field theory are developed in a traditional
manner through canonical quantization. This book consists of my
lectures in this course. At Rochester, we also teach a separate course
on quantum field theory based on the path integral approach and
my lectures in that course have already been published by World
Scientific in
A. Das, Field Theory: A Path Integral Approach (Second Edition),
World Scientific, Singapore (2006).
The material in the present book should be thought of as comple-
mentary to this earlier book. In fact, in the present lectures, there is
no attempt to develop the path integral methods, rather we use the
results from path integrals with a brief discussion when needed.
The topics covered in the present book contain exactly the mate-
rial discussed in the two-semester course except for Chapter 10 (Dirac
quantization) and Chapter 11 (Discrete symmetries) which have been
added for completeness and are normally discussed in another course.
Quantum field theory is a vast subject and only selected topics, which
I personally feel every graduate student in the subject should know,
have been covered in these lectures. Needless to say, there are many
other important topics which have not been discussed because of
time constraints in the course (and space constraints in the book).
However, all the material covered in this book has been presented in
an informal (classroom like) setting with detailed derivations which
should be helpful to students.
A book of this size is bound to have many possible sources of
error. However, since my lectures have already been used by various
people in different universities, I have been fortunate to have their
feedback which I have incorporated into the bo ok. In addition, sev-
eral other people have read all the chapters carefully and I thank
them all for their comments. In particular, it is a pleasure for me to
thank Ms. Judy Mack and Professor Susumu Okubo for their tireless
effort in going through the entire material. I am personally grateful
to Dr. John Boersma for painstakingly and meticulously checking all
the mathematical derivations. Of course, any remaining errors and
typos are my own.
Like the subject itself, the list of references to topics in quantum
field theory is enormous and it is simply impossible to do justice to
everyone who has contributed to the growth of the subject. I have
in no way attempted to give an exhaustive list of references to the
subject. Instead I have listed only a few suggestive references at the
end of each chapter in the hope that the readers can get to the other
references from these sources.
The Feynman graphs in this book were drawn using Jaxodraw
while most other figures were generated using PSTricks. I am grate-
ful to the people who developed these extremely useful softwares.
Finally, I would like to thank Dave Munson for helping out with
various computer related problems