Summer stuff

Every single day I find stuff I would like to learn more about during the coming summer. Last year I pretended to learn general relativity and quantum field theory. I only got around to learn the basics. It was not enough, in my opinion, but I was very distracted and not motivated.

This summer is going to be different. Well, it has to be. Or else I am really done. Besides working on my research (more on that later),  I want to learn about stuff. Stuff like what? A fair topic is supersymmetry and supergravity. During this semester I saw a bit of supersymmetry in the advanced field theory class. That was fun, but I feel like I still need more “practice”. My plan is to go through GGRS’ book Superspace. I still do not know how much, but I want to cover some of the quantum calculations in supergravity.

Something I wish to understand in more detail is the quantization of gauge fields. I saw some particular gauges this semester, but I want to learn more about the Faddeev-Popov construction and everything that comes with gauge fixing. That means learning more about BRST symmetry. I also wish to understand better the background gauge method. Also, I need to learn some renormalization. For all these I guess I will use some of the text books I have plus copies of the lecture notes I got from last year’s AQFT course taught by van Nieuwenhuizen.

Finally, and this is for fun, I want to learn more about monopoles in gauge theories. For that I think I will go with Harvey’s notes on the arXiv. This is all very ambitious, and it is pretty bad since at the end of the summer I only accomplish a fraction of all these and it looks small.

Oh, and maybe some string theory.

Superspace

I have re-discovered

Superspace, or one thousand and one lessons in supersymmetry by S. J. Gates, et al. hep-th/0108200

This adds one more item to the list of things to cover during the summer…

Another summer list

Here are some topics I want to learn more about (and some I want to really understand) during the summer:

• BRST symmetry
• renormalization
• renormalization of gauge theories
• supersymmetry and supergravity
• some string theory (whatever I need to learn more about the AdS/CFT correspondence)
• instantons
• general monopoles
• some fancy mathematics

Hopefully this list will motivate me to write something about each topic on this list.

Summer readings

I have been thinking what to read during the coming summer 2008 “break”. Here are some items:

• Aspects of Symmetry by Sydey Coleman
• 50 years of Yang-Mills theory by a lot of very smart people…
• Gauge fields and strings by A. Polyakov
• hep-th/9603086 – Magnetic monopoles, duality and supersymmetry by J. A. Harvey
• Gauge fields, knots and gravity by John Baez
• A review on AdS/CFT perhaps?

Most of these do not share a common theme. Knowing last summer’s experience I will probably jump from topic to topic and get very little out of each. So instead I plan to just pick one of these (whichever seems more pertinent at the moment) and go through most of the material. I guess the lecture notes on monopoles and the knot theory book are just for fun, since I have been learning about this topics lately and am hungry for more. Alas, it might not be so important for my research. I should also learn renormalization at some point, maybe from Peskin and Schroeder. Unless the QFT course really picks up on this last month of classes…