Gauge Theory Student Meetings

last updated: 1.10 PM, Dec 5, 2018

what Students with some prior exposure to electromagnetism and special relativity meet once a week to systematically discuss topics in gauge theory.
More specifically, these meetings aim to clearly understand the different constituents that make up a gauge theory:
  1. a theory of matter fields with a global symmetry giving rise to conserved currents,
  2. a theory of gauge fields ("forces") that are endowed with an intrinsic redundancy, and
  3. their interrelation via Noether's theorem and gauge invariance.
Additional topics that can be discussed can be found further below under Suggestions for further meetings. Input welcome!
when weekly, 2pm, 4-285 CCIS
contact Jens Boos (boos@ualberta.ca)
URL http://www.spintwo.net/Courses/Gauge-Theory-Student-Meetings/

Past meetings

  1. 2018-09-12: organizational issues, outline [01]
  2. 2018-09-19: From the Maxwell equations to a U(1) gauge theory [01, 02, gauge-theory-visualization-v2.pdf]
  3. 2018-09-26: Q&A session for the lecture on Sep 19 [01, 02]
  4. 2018-10-03: Noether's theorem in field theory [01, 02, notes]
  5. 2018-10-10: A mini-introduction to Lie groups [01, 02, 03, notes]
  6. 2018-10-17: Yang–Mills theory (1/2): quarks and the covariant derivative [01, 02]
  7. 2018-10-24: Yang–Mills theory (2/2): a kinetic term for the gluons [01, 02]
  8. 2018-10-31: Ising gauge theory [01, 02, notes]
  9. 2018-11-07: lattice gauge theory [01, 02]
    2018-11-14: no meeting (reading week)
  10. 2018-11-21: Abelian Higgs model [01, 02, 03]
  11. 2018-11-28: Electromagnetism and differential forms [01, 02, 03]
  12. 2018-12-05: Gravity as a gauge theory? [01]

Suggestions for further meetings

  1. Holonomies and curvature: the geometrical interpretation of gauge theory
  2. Higgs mechanism; the Stueckelberg Lagrangian and the affine Higgs mechanism
  3. The standard model: a SU(3)×SU(2)×U(1) gauge theory
  4. Gauge fixing and the Faddeev–Popov determinant
  5. ...

Literature

  1. L. O'Raifeartaigh, “Hidden Gauge Symmetry,” Rept. Prog. Phys. 42 (1979) 159 [inspire]. Click here for a PDF of the article (user name: yang, password: mills).
  2. L. O'Raifeartaigh, The Dawning of Gauge Theory (Princeton University Press, 1997), table of contents here, website here.
  3. Roger Penrose, The Road to Reality (Random House, 2004), website here.
  4. J. D. Jackson and L. B. Okun, “Historical roots of gauge invariance,” Rev. Mod. Phys. 73 (2001) 663; hep-ph/0012061.
  5. Useful questions on StackExchange Mathematics: 719487 (PDF) and 1465315 (PDF)
  6. S. M. Martin, “A Supersymmetry primer,” Adv. Ser. Direct. High Energy Phys. 21 (2010) 1; Adv. Ser. Direct. High Energy Phys. 18 (1998) 1; hep-ph/9709356.
  7. F. W. Hehl, “Gauge theory of gravity and spacetime,” Einstein Stud. 13 (2017) 145-169; 1204.3672 [gr-qc].
  8. additional materials/textbooks: TBD