SELECTED TOPICS IN QUANTUM FIELD THEORY

The book is based on a one-semester lecture course that the author taught at Charles University for more than ten years, as a follow-up to an introductory basic course. Its contents corresponds to an intermediate level of quantum field theory, and includes topics like regularization and renormalization methods, Cutkosky rules for imaginary part of loop diagrams, infrared divergences in quantum electrodynamics, renormalization group techniques, basics of quantum chromodynamics including the connection between unitarity and ghosts, asymptotic freedom, ABJ axial anomaly and trace anomaly.

This book is aimed at any reader who has mastered techniques for evaluation of Feynman diagrams in field theory models up to the one-loop level. The accent is on detailed explicit calculations of tree-level and one-loop Feynman diagrams in quantum electrodynamics and quantum chromodynamics. In particular, the chapters devoted to the ABJ anomaly cover both its ultraviolet and infrared aspects, and display computational details in an extent not quite common in other competing texts available in current literature.