SPA7018U/P - Relativistic Waves and Quantum Fields - 2023/24

Relativistic wave equations for particles of various spins will be derived and studied, and the physical interpretations of their solutions will be analysed. After an introduction to classical field theory, and the role of symmetries in field theory (including the beautiful Noether's theorem) students will learn the fundamental concepts of quantum field theory, including the quantisation of the free Klein-Gordon and Dirac fields and the derivation of the Feynman propagator. Interactions are introduced and a systematic procedure to calculate scattering amplitudes using Feynman diagrams is derived. We will also compute some explicit tree-level scattering amplitudes in a number of simple examples.