Shang-Keng Ma London: W A Benjamin 1976 pp xxix + 561 price £17.15 ( cased ), £9.40 ( paperback ) This book should become an extremely valuable introduction to the renormalization group approach to critical phenomena, as developed by Wilson and others in the past few years. It covers most of the standard material in an elegant and carefully argued fashion, and should enable the reader to tackle the latest research literature.
Shang-Keng Ma London: W A Benjamin 1976 pp xxix + 561 price £17.15 ( cased ), £9.40 ( paperback ) This book should become an extremely valuable introduction to the renormalization group approach to critical phenomena, as developed by Wilson and others in the past few years. It covers most of the standard material in an elegant and carefully argued fashion, and should enable the reader to tackle the latest research literature.
Critical phenomena is one of the most exciting areas of modern physics. This 2007 book provides a thorough but economic introduction into the principles and techniques of the theory of critical phenomena and the renormalization group, from the perspective of modern condensed matter physics. Assuming basic knowledge of quantum and statistical mechanics, the book discusses phase transitions in magnets, superfluids, superconductors, and gauge field theories. Particular attention is given to topics such as gauge field fluctuations in superconductors, the Kosterlitz-Thouless transition, duality transformations, and quantum phase transitions - all of which are at the forefront of physics research. This book contains numerous problems of varying degrees of difficulty, with solutions. These problems provide readers with a wealth of material to test their understanding of the subject. It is ideal for graduate students and more experienced researchers in the fields of condensed matter physics, statistical physics, and many-body physics.
The stated goal of this book is to fill a perceived gap between undergraduate texts on critical phenomena and advanced texts on quantum field theory, in the general area of renormalization methods. It is debatable whether this gap really exists nowadays, as a number of books have appeared in which it is made clear that field-theoretic renormalization group methods are not the preserve of particle theory, and indeed are far more easily appreciated in the contexts of statistical and condensed matter physics. Nevertheless, this volume does have a fresh aspect to it, perhaps because of the author's background in fluid dynamics and turbulence theory, rather than through the more traditional migration from particle physics. The book begins at a very elementary level, in an effort to motivate the use of renormalization methods. This is a worthy effort, but it is likely that most of this section will be thought too elementary by readers wanting to get their teeth into the subject, while those for whom this section is apparently written are likely to find the later chapters rather challenging. The author's particular approach then leads him to emphasise the role of renormalized perturbation theory (rather than the renormalization group) in a number of problems, including non-linear systems and turbulence. Some of these ideas will be novel and perhaps even surprising to traditionally trained field theorists. Most of the rest of the book is on far more familiar territory: the momentum-space renormalization group, epsilon-expansion, and so on. This is standard stuff, and, like many other textbooks, it takes a considerable chunk of the book to explain all the formalism. As a result, there is only space to discuss the standard ϕ 4 field theory as applied to the Ising model (even the N -vector model is not covered) so that no impression is conveyed of the power and extent of all the applications and generalizations of the techniques. It is regrettable that so much space is spent on rather oversimplified and unrelated models in the first part of the book that, in the end, the reader is left breathless on the threshold of the really interesting material. Despite the earlier emphasis on the application of renormalization ideas in dynamics, in the end the full power of the field-theoretical approach is not applied to the obvious arena of dynamic critical phenomena (where there certainly is currently a gap in the literature) but to the Navier--Stokes equations. The development of the book is somewhat illogical in places. Mean field theory interrupts discussion of block spin methods and scaling arguments---the two are distinct approaches. The Callan--Symanzik equation is introduced before Feynman diagrams are explained, so that there is a hiatus before the actual results for the critical exponents can be found. I think this book is too broad in some respects, and too limited in others, to be a really useful textbook for a course on renormalization methods. Those who have learned these ideas either from field theory, or from nonlinear systems, will find it more rewarding for the sections covering the topics with which they are less familiar. For this reason alone, the book should at least find a place on most library reference shelves.
The sophistication of modern tools used in the study of statistical mechanics and field theory is often an obstacle to the easy understanding of new important current results reported in journals. The main purpose of this book is to introduce the reader to the methods of the fluctuation (field) theory of phase transitions and critical phenomena so as to provide a good source for research. The introductory contents are concerned with ideas of description, thermodynamic stability theory related to phase transitions, major experimental facts, basic models and their relationships. Special attention is paid to the mean field approximation and to the Landau expansion for simple and complex models of critical and multicritical phenomena. An instructive representation of the modern perturbation theory and the method of the renormalization group is developed for field models of phase transitions. The essential influence of the fluctuations on the critical behaviour is established together with the theory of correlation functions, Gaussian approximation, the Ginzburg criterion, [symbol]- and 1/n- expansions as practical realizations of the renormalization group ideas. Applications of the theory to concrete aspects of condensed matter physics are considered: quantum effects, Bose condensation, crystal anisotropy, superconductors and liquid crystals, effects of disorder of type randomly distributed quenched impurities and random fields. This volume can be used as an advanced University course book for students with a basic knowledge of statistical physics and quantum mechanics. It could be considered as a complementary text to a standard University course on statistical physics
Abstract The successful calculation of critical exponents for continuous phase transitions is one of the main achievements of theoretical physics over the last quarter-century. This was achieved through the use of scaling and field-theoretic techniques which have since become standard equipment in many areas of physics, especially quantum field theory. This book provides a thorough introduction to these techniques. Continuous phase transitions are introduced, then the necessary statistical mechanics is summarized, followed by standard models, some exact solutions and techniques for numerical simulations. The real-space renormalization group and mean-field theory are then explained and illustrated. The final chapters cover the Landau-Ginzburg model, from physical motivation, through diagrammatic perturbation theory and renormalization to the renormalization group and the calculation of critical exponents above and below the critical temperature.
The basic idea of the renormalization group is introduced and illustrative examples are presented. Emphasis is put on the application to the theory of critical phenomena. This article is prepared for pedagogical purposes. It is written at a level that a second-year graduate student in physical sciences can understand. No previous knowledge of critical phenomena or field theory is needed. We make no attempt to survey the field or cover a wide range of subjects. On the contrary, we limit the scope to the most basic aspects. We choose to elaborate at length to make the basic idea clear and the definitions precise, and to go through the examples very carefully. We feel that once these basic aspect are understood, there will be no difficulty in confronting the rapidly expanding literature on this subject.