Perturbation Theory and Feynman Diagrams

This chapter introduces perturbation theory and Feynman diagrams for both equilibrium and nonequilibrium systems. The theory is used to treat the many-body problems in several areas of physics; readers interested in more information can consult the references. Here, I will focus mainly on what is relevant to transport.

Lin Lin, Michael Lindsey

Many-body perturbation theory (MBPT) is widely used in quantum physics, chemistry, and materials science. At the heart of MBPT is the Feynman diagrammatic expansion, which is, simply speaking, an elegant way of organizing the combinatorially growing number of terms of a certain Taylor expansion. In particular, the construction of the `bold Feynman diagrammatic expansion' involves the partial resummation to infinite order of possibly divergent series of diagrams. This procedure demands investigation from both the combinatorial (perturbative) and the analytical (non-perturbative) viewpoints. In Part I of this two-part series, we illustrate how the combinatorial properties of Feynman diagrams in MBPT can be studied in the simplified setting of Gibbs measures (known as the Euclidean lattice field theory in the physics literature) and provide a self-contained explanation of Feynman diagrams in this setting. We prove the combinatorial validity of the bold diagrammatic expansion, with methods generalizable to several types of field theories and interactions. Our treatment simplifies the presentation and numerical study of known techniques in MBPT such as the self-consistent Hartree-Fock approximation (HF), the second-order Green's function approximation (GF2), and the GW approximation. The bold diagrams are closely related to the Luttinger-Ward (LW) formalism, which was proposed in 1960 but whose analytic properties have not been rigorously established. The analytical study of the LW formalism in the setting of Gibbs measures will be the topic of Part II.

K. B. Efetov

L.D. LANDAU, E.M. LIFSHITZ

Zakariah Crane

In this paper we will demonstrate the use of Feynman Diagrams for one dimensional scattering in quantum mechanics. We will evaluate the S-Matrix explicitly for the Dirac delta and finite wall potentials by summing the full series of Feynman diagrams, illustrating the spirit of perturbation theory. This technique may be useful in introductory quantum mechanics courses, and provides the student with intuition about conservation laws in the context of scattering problems by connecting Feynman diagrams, free propagation, and conservation of the corresponding observable. It also provides a toy model for calculating S-matrix elements in quantum field theory.