From Special Relativity to Feynman Diagrams

This books aims at filling a gap between the basics courses of classical and quantum mechanics and advanced courses of (relativistic) quantum mechanics and field theory. Particular emphasis is given to the role of symmetry in modern theoretical physics. For this reason this book is particularly suited to those students who are interested in a deeper knowledge of modern developments in elementary particle physics and relativity, even if they choose not to specialize in this branch of research. This target of readers includes, besides experimental and applied physicists, also those engineers who need advanced notions of theoretical high energy physics, in view of future research activity in the field theory approach to condensed matter, in accelerator physics and in all those modern technology sectors which require a more advanced and sophisticated theoretical physics background. Courses motivated by these objectives are present in several polytechnic institutes around the world. The last chapters of this book, in particular, are of particular importance to those engineers who plan to work in high energy physics research centres, like LHC at CERN, or to collaborate to experiments on the revelation of gravitational waves. As far as engineering is concerned, it is important to stress that elementary Special and General Relativity courses are often absent in their curricula.

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The first two chapters of the book deal, in a detailed way, with relativistic kinematics and dynamics, while in the third chapter some elementary concepts of General Relativity are given. Eventually, after an introduction to tensor calculus, a Lorentz covariant formulation of electromagnetism is given its quantization is developed. For a proper treatment of invariance and conservation laws in physics, an introductory chapter on group theory is given. This introduction is propedeutical to the discussion of conservation laws in the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formalism, which will allow us to export this formalism to quantum mechanics and, in particular, to introduce linear operators on quantum states and their transformation laws. In the last part of the book we analyze, in the first quantized formalism, relativistic field theory for both boson and fermion fields. The second quantization of free fields is then introduced and some preliminary concepts of perturbation theory and Feynmann diagrams are given and some relevant examples are worked out.