Quantum many-body physics a path integral approach

John W. Negele

Rosenfelder, R.

These lectures are intended for graduate students who want to acquire a working knowledge of path integral methods in a wide variety of fields in physics. In general the presentation is elementary and path integrals are developed in the usual heuristic, non-mathematical way for application in many diverse problems in quantum physics. Three main parts deal with path integrals in non-relativistic quantum mechanics, many-body physics and field theory and contain standard examples (quadratic Lagrangians, tunneling, description of bosons and fermions, quantization of gauge theories etc.) as well as specialized topics (scattering, dissipative systems, spin \& color in the path integral, lattice methods etc.). In each part simple Fortran programs which can be run on a PC, illustrate the numerical evaluation of (Euclidean) path integrals by Monte-Carlo or variational methods. Also included are the set of problems which accompanied the lectures and their solutions.

Yoshio Kuramoto

F. A. Buot

It is suggested that complex problems in ultrasubmicrometer electronics research may greatly benefit from use of the path-integral technique. The use of the Weyl-Wigner formalism of the quantum dynamics of electrons in solids provides a rigorous and straightforward derivation of the path integral in solid-state physics, both from the single-particle and from the many-body field-theoretical description of electron dynamics, without the need to postulate a priori the isomorphism between quantum operators and c-numbers of the base field. A rigorous construction of the path integral in many-body solid-state band theory necessitates a two-stage Weyl correspondence between quantum operators and c-numbers of the base field, namely, the Weyl correspondence of the base field of ``lattice-space'' particle-dynamical variables and that of the continuum many-body field-dynamical variables.

Gert Roepstorff

Alexander Altland, Benjamin D. Simons

The aim of this chapter is to introduce the concept of the Feynman path integral. As well as developing the general construction scheme, particular emphasis is placed on establishing the interconnections between the quantum mechanical path integral, classical Hamiltonian mechanics, and classical statistical mechanics. The practice of path integration is discussed in the context of several pedagogical applications. As well as the canonical examples of a quantum particle in a single and a double potential well, we discuss the generalization of the path integral scheme to tunneling of extended objects (quantum fields), dissipative and thermally assisted quantum tunneling, and the quantum mechanical spin. In this chapter we temporarily leave the arena of many-body physics and second quantization and, at least superficially, return to single-particle quantum mechanics. By establishing the path integral approach for ordinary quantum mechanics, we will set the stage for the introduction of field integral methods for many-body theories explored in the next chapter. We will see that the path integral not only represents a gateway to higher-dimensional functional integral methods but, when viewed from an appropriate perspective, already represents a field theoretical approach in its own right. Exploiting this connection, various concepts of field theory, namely stationary phase analysis, the Euclidean formulation of field theory, instanton techniques, and the role of topology in field theory, are introduced in this chapter. The path integral: general formalism Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to the formulation of quantum mechanics: the “operator approach” based on the canonical quantization of physical observables and the associated operator algebra, and the Feynman path integral.