By Antal Jakovác and András Patkós
Springer
The book re-collects notes written by the authors for a course on finite-temperature quantum fields, and more specifically on the application of effective models of strong and electroweak interactions in particle-physics phenomenology.
The topics selected reflect the research interests of the authors, nevertheless in their opinion, the material covered in the volume can help students of master’s degrees in physics to improve their ability to deal with reorganisations of the perturbation series of renormalisable theories.
The book is made up of eight chapters and is organised in four parts. An historic overview of effective theories (which are scientific theories that propose to model certain effects without proposing to adequately model their causes) opens the text, then two chapters provide the basics of quantum field theory necessary for following the directions of contemporary research. The third part introduces three different and widely used approaches to improving convergence properties of renormalised perturbation theory. Finally, results that emerge from the application of these techniques to the thermodynamics of strong and electroweak interactions are reviewed in the last two chapters.
