Hagen Kleinert

This is the fifth, expanded edition of the comprehensive textbook published in 1990 on the theory and applications of path integrals. It is the first book to explicitly solve path integrals of a wide variety of nontrivial quantum-mechanical systems, in particular the hydrogen atom. The solutions have been made possible by two major advances. The first is a new euclidean path integral formula which increases the restricted range of applicability of Feynman's time-sliced formula to include singular attractive 1/r- and 1/r2-potentials. The second is a new nonholonomic mapping principle carrying physical laws in flat spacetime to spacetimes with curvature and torsion, which leads to time-sliced path integrals that are manifestly invariant under coordinate transformations. In addition to the time-sliced definition, the author gives a perturbative, coordinate-independent definition of path integrals, which makes them invariant under coordinate transformations. A consistent implementation of this property leads to an extension of the theory of generalized functions by defining uniquely products of distributions. The powerful FeynmanKleinert variational approach is explained and developed systematically into a variational perturbation theory which, in contrast to ordinary perturbation theory, produces convergent results. The convergence is uniform from weak to strong couplings, opening a way to precise evaluations of analytically unsolvable path integrals in the strong-coupling regime where they describe critical phenomena. Tunneling processes are treated in detail, with applications to the lifetimes of supercurrents, the stability of metastable thermodynamic phases, and thelarge-order behavior of perturbation expansions. A variational treatment extends the range of validity to small barriers. A corresponding extension of the large-order perturbation theory now also applies to small orders. Special attention is devoted to path integrals with topological restrictions needed to understand the statistical properties of elementary particles and the entanglement phenomena in polymer physics and biophysics. The ChernSimons theory of particles with fractional statistics (anyons) is introduced and applied to explain the fractional quantum Hall effect. The relevance of path integrals to financial markets is discussed, and improvements of the famous BlackScholes formula for option prices are developed which account for the fact, recently experienced in the world markets, that large fluctuations occur much more frequently than in Gaussian distributions.

Path Integrals in Quantum Mechanics, Statistics, Polymer Physics, and Financial Markets

Remo Ruffini

Robert T. Jantzen

The Marcel Grossman Meetings are three-yearly forums that meet to discuss recent advances in gravitation, general relativity and relativistic field theories, emphasizing their mathematical foundations, physical predictions and experimental tests. These meetings aim to facilitate the exchange of ideas among scientists, to deepen our understanding of space-time structures, and to review the status of ongoing experiments and observations testing Einstein's theory of gravitation either from ground or space-based experiments. Since the first meeting in 1975 in Trieste, Italy, which was established by Remo Ruffini and Abdus Salam, the range of topics presented at these meetings has gradually widened to accommodate issues of major scientific interest, and attendance has grown to attract more than 900 participants from over 80 countries. This proceedings volume of the eleventh meeting in the series, held in Berlin in 2006, highlights and records the developments and applications of Einstein's theory in diverse areas ranging from fundamental field theories to particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology, made possible by unprecedented technological developments in experimental and observational techniques from space, ground and underground observatories. It provides a broad sampling of the current work in the field, especially relativistic astrophysics, including many reviews by leading figures in the research community

On Recent Developments in Theoretical and Experimental General Relativity, Gravitation and Relativistic Field Theories : Proceedings of the MG11 Meeting on General Relativity, Berlin, Germany, 23-29 July 2006

The Eleventh Marcel Grossmann Meeting

Topological restrictions. These are relevant to the understanding of the statistical properties of elementary particles and the entanglement phenomena in polymer physics and biophysics. The Chern-Simons theory of particles with fractional statistics (anyons) is introduced and applied to explain the fractional quantum Hall effect." "The relevance of path integrals to financial markets is discussed, and improvements of the famous Black-Scholes formula for option prices are developed which account for the fact that large market fluctuations occur much more frequently than in Gaussian distributions." --Book Jacket.

This is an introductory book dealing with collective phenomena in many-body systems. A gas of bosons or fermions can show oscillations of various types of density. These are described by different combinations of field variables. Especially delicate is the competition of these variables. In superfluid 3He, for example, the atoms can be attracted to each other by molecular forces, whereas they are repelled from each other at short distance due to a hardcore repulsion. The attraction gives rise to Cooper pairs, and the repulsion is overcome by paramagnon oscillations. The combination is what finally led to the discovery of superfluidity in 3He. In general, the competition between various channels can most efficiently be studied by means of a classical version of the Hubbard-Stratonovich transformation.A gas of electrons is controlled by the interplay of plasma oscillations and pair formation. In a system of rod- or disc-like molecules, liquid crystals are observed with directional orientations that behave in unusual five-fold or seven-fold symmetry patterns. The existence of such a symmetry was postulated in 1975 by the author and K Maki. An aluminium material of this type was later manufactured by Dan Shechtman which won him the 2014 Nobel prize. The last chapter presents some solvable models, one of which was the first to illustrate the existence of broken supersymmetry in nuclei.

Collective Classical And Quantum Fields: In Plasmas, Superconductors, Superfluid 3he, And Liquid Crystals

This is the fourth, expanded edition of the comprehensive textbook published in 1990 on the theory and applications of path integrals. It is the first book to explicitly solve path integrals of a wide variety of nontrivial quantum-mechanical systems, in particular the hydrogen atom. The solutions have become possible by two major advances. The first is a new euclidean path integral formula which increases the restricted range of applicability of Feynman's famous formula to include singular attractive 1/r and 1/r2 potentials. The second is a simple quantum equivalence principle governing the transformation of euclidean path integrals to spaces with curvature and torsion, which leads to time-sliced path integrals that are manifestly invariant under coordinate transformations. In addition to the time-sliced definition, the author gives a perturbative definition of path integrals which makes them invariant under coordinate transformations. A consistent implementation of this property leads to an extension of the theory of generalized functions by defining uniquely integrals over products of distributions. The powerful Feynman–Kleinert variational approach is explained and developed systematically into a variational perturbation theory which, in contrast to ordinary perturbation theory, produces convergent expansions. The convergence is uniform from weak to strong couplings, opening a way to precise approximate evaluations of analytically unsolvable path integrals. Tunneling processes are treated in detail. The results are used to determine the lifetime of supercurrents, the stability of metastable thermodynamic phases, and the large-order behavior of perturbation expansions. A new variational treatment extends the range of validity of previous tunneling theories from large to small barriers. A corresponding extension of large-order perturbation theory also applies now to small orders. Special attention is devoted to path integrals with topological restrictions. These are relevant to the understanding of the statistical properties of elementary particles and the entanglement phenomena in polymer physics and biophysics. The Chern–Simons theory of particles with fractional statistics (anyons) is introduced and applied to explain the fractional quantum Hall effect. The relevance of path integrals to financial markets is discussed, and improvements of the famous Black–Scholes formula for option prices are given which account for the fact that large market fluctuations occur much more frequently than in the commonly used Gaussian distributions. The author's other book on ‘Critical Properties of φ4 Theories’ gives a thorough introduction to the field of critical phenomena and develops new powerful resummation techniques for the extraction of physical results from the divergent perturbation expansions.

Fourth Edition

This is the fourth, expanded edition of the comprehensive textbook published in 1990 on the theory and applications of path integrals. It is the first book to explicitly solve path integrals of a wide variety of nontrivial quantum-mechanical systems, in particular the hydrogen atom. The solutions have become possible by two major advances. The first is a new euclidean path integral formula which increases the restricted range of applicability of Feynman's famous formula to include singular attractive 1/r and 1/r2 potentials. The second is a simple quantum equivalence principle governing the transformation of euclidean path integrals to spaces with curvature and torsion, which leads to time-sliced path integrals that are manifestly invariant under coordinate transformations. In addition to the time-sliced definition, the author gives a perturbative definition of path integrals which makes them invariant under coordinate transformations. A consistent implementation of this property leads to an extension of the theory of generalized functions by defining uniquely integrals over products of distributions. The powerful Feynman-Kleinert variational approach is explained and developed systematically into a variational perturbation theory which, in contrast to ordinary perturbation theory, produces convergent expansions. The convergence is uniform from weak to strong couplings, opening a way to precise approximate evaluations of analytically unsolvable path integrals. Tunneling processes are treated in detail. The results are used to determine the lifetime of supercurrents, the stability of metastable thermodynamic phases, and the large-order behavior of perturbation expansions. A newvariational treatment extends the range of validity of previous tunneling theories from large to small barriers. A corresponding extension of large-order perturbation theory also applies now to small orders. Special attention is devoted to path integrals with topological restrictions. These are relevant to the understanding of the statistical properties of elementary particles and the entanglement phenomena in polymer physics and biophysics. The Chern-Simons theory of particles with fractional statistics (anyons) is introduced and applied to explain the fractional quantum Hall effect. The relevance of path integrals to financial markets is discussed, and improvements of the famous Black-Scholes formula for option prices are given which account for the fact that large market fluctuations occur much more frequently than in the commonly used Gaussian distributions. The author's other book on 'Critical Properties of phi; 4 Theories' gives a thorough introduction to the field of critical phenomena and develops new powerful resummation techniques for the extraction of physical results from the divergent perturbation expansions.

This is the third, significantly expanded edition of the comprehensive textbook published in 1990 on the theory and applications of path integrals. It is the first book to explicitly solve path integrals of a wide variety of nontrivial quantum-mechanical systems, in particular the hydrogen atom. The solutions have become possible by two major advances. The first is a new euclidean path integral formula which increases the restricted range of applicability of Feynman's famous formula to include singular attractive 1/r and 1/r2 potentials. The second is a simple quantum equivalence principle governing the transformation of euclidean path integrals to spaces with curvature and torsion, which leads to time-sliced path integrals that are manifestly invariant under coordinate transformations. In addition to the time-sliced definition, the author gives a perturbative definition of path integrals which makes them invariant under coordinate transformations. A consistent implementation of this property leads to an extension of the theory of generalized functions by defining uniquely integrals over products of distributions. The powerful Feynman -- Kleinert variational approach is explained and developed systematically into a variational perturbation theory which, in contrast to ordinary perturbation theory, produces convergent expansions. The convergence is uniform from weak to strong couplings, opening a way to precise approximate evaluations of analytically unsolvable path integrals. Tunneling processes are treated in detail. The results are used to determine the lifetime of supercurrents, the stability of metastable thermodynamic phases, and the large-order behavior of perturbationexpansions. A new variational treatment extends the range of validity of previous tunneling theories from large to small barriers. A corresponding extension of large-order perturbation theory also applies now to small orders. Special attention is devoted to path integrals with topological restrictions. These are relevant to the understanding of the statistical properties of elementary particles and the entanglement phenomena in polymer physics and biophysics. The Chem-Simons theory of particles with fractional statistics (anyohs) is introduced and applied to explain the fractional quantum Hall effect. The relevance of path integrals to financial markets is discussed, and improvements of the famous Black -- Scholes formula for option prices are given which account for the fact that large market fluctuations occur much more frequently than in the commonly used Gaussian distributions.

Verena Schulte-Frohlinde

This book explains in detail how to perform perturbation expansions in quantum field theory to high orders, and how to extract the critical properties of the theory from the resulting divergent power series. These properties are calculated for various second-order phase transitions of three-dimensional systems with high accuracy, in particular the critical exponents observable in experiments close to the phase transition.Beginning with an introduction to critical phenomena, this book develops the functional-integral description of quantum field theories, their perturbation expansions, and a method for finding recursively all Feynman diagrams to any order in the coupling strength. Algebraic computer programs are supplied on accompanying World Wide Web pages. The diagrams correspond to integrals in momentum space. They are evaluated in 4-î dimensions, where they possess pole terms in 1/î. The pole terms are collected into renormalization constants.The theory of the renormalization group is used to find the critical scaling laws. They contain critical exponents which are obtained from the renormalization constants in the form of power series. These are divergent, due to factorially growing expansion coefficients. The evaluation requires resummation procedures, which are performed in two ways: (1) using traditional methods based on Pad and Borel transformations, combined with analytic mappings; (2) using modern variational perturbation theory, where the results follow from a simple strong-coupling formula. As a crucial test of the accuracy of the methods, the critical exponent à governing the divergence of the specific heat of superfluid helium is shown to agree very well with the extremely precise experimental number found in the space shuttle orbiting the earth (whose data are displayed on the cover of the book).The phi4-theories investigated in this book contain any number N of fields in an O(N)-symmetric interaction, or in an interaction in which O(N)-symmetry is broken by a term of a cubic symmetry. The crossover behavior between the different symmetries is investigated. In addition, alternative ways of obtaining critical exponents of phi4-theories are sketched, such as variational perturbation expansions in three rather than 4-î dimensions, and improved ratio tests in high-temperature expansions of lattice models.

Hagen Kleinert

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