Roberto Casalbuoni - Böcker

The workshop collected together theoreticians and experimentalists for a discussion about the most recent experiments and their impact on theoretical ideas. The discussion included the new data from LEP and SLD, the evidence for the top quark from Tevatron, the structure function measurements from HERA, and the searches for dark matter. Also, new projects for physics with large neutrino detectors and CP violation at e+e- factories were presented, and a survey of high energy astroparticle physics was included. Particular attention was paid to the interplay between microscopical and cosmological scales.

This book contains the invited contributions to the 6th International Conference on Path Integrals from peV to TeV, held in Florence in 1998. The conference, devoted to functional integration, brought together many physicists with interests ranging from elementary particles to nuclear, solid state, liquid state, polymer and complex systems physics. The variety of topics is reflected in the book, which is a unique collection of papers on manifold applications of functional methods in several areas of physics.

This book deals with quantum field theory, the language of modern elementary particles physics. Based on university lectures given by the author, this volume provides a detailed technical treatment of quantum field theory that is particularly useful for students; it begins with the quantization of the most important free fields, the scalar, the spin-1/2 and the photon fields, and is then followed by a detailed account of symmetry properties, including a discussion on global and local symmetries and the spontaneous breaking of symmetries. Perturbation theory, one-loop effects for quantum electrodynamics, and renormalization properties are also covered. In this second edition new chapters have been introduced with a general description of path integral quantization both on quantum mechanics and in quantum field theory, with a particular attention to the gauge fields. The path integral quantization of Fermi fields is also discussed.