22 May 2007

Where is the quanta in this blog?

I have been reading the first few chapters of Srednicki's QFT. I feel like I have been moving slowly, I am still struggling with chapter 2 on Lorentz Invariance. I just want to make sure I understand how to work out all the derivations that are part of the end-of-the-chapter problems. Most of the problems are finding the commutator of a scalar field with the Lorentz generators and other stuff. More progress has been made in the next chapter on canonical quantization. I think I was successful in quantizing the complex (non-hermitian) scalar field. I was able to show that the field and its hermitian conjugate ( h.c.) obey the Klein-Gordon equation, I found that the conjugate momenta of a field are really the time-derivative of the h.c. field (i.e. for the field the conjugate momenta is the h.c. of the field-dotted) and wrote everything in terms of a mode expansion. Then I tried my hand at writing the commutators for the coefficients and their h.c., but I had a bit of a hard time understanding the motivation behind some of these commutators. Anyways, I think I wrote down the Hamiltonian density and integrated to obtain the Hamiltonian. I am going to try my hand now at the LSZ reduction formula for the complex scalar field.

I also found some nice material on Ryder's book on QFT about Lorentz invariance and the generators. Might take a look at that later in the evening.

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