Sunday 4 February 2018

Quantum feild theory

We all know there are 4 major forces in unverse gravitational force, electromagnetic force, weak nuclear force, strong nuclear force all work at different level and discribe different aspect of universe.In theoretical physics, quantum field theory  (QFT) is the theoretical framework for constructing quantum mechanical models of subatomic particles in particle physics and quasiparticles in condensed matter physics. It is a set of notions and mathematical tools that combines classical fields, special relativity, and quantum mechanics, and, when combined with the cluster decomposition principle, it may be the only  way to do so, while retaining the ideas of quantum point particles and locality. QFT was historically widely believed to be truly fundamental. It is now believed, primarily due to the continued failures of quantization of general relativity, to be only a very good low-energy approximation, i.e. an effective field theory, to some more fundamental theory.

QFT treats particles as excited states of the underlying field, so these are called field quanta. In quantum field theory, quantum mechanical interactions among particles are described by interaction terms among the corresponding underlying quantum fields. These interactions are conveniently visualized by Feynman diagrams, which are a formal tool of relativistically covariant perturbation theory, serving to evaluate particle processes.The first achievement of quantum field theory, namely quantum electrodynamics (QED), is "still the paradigmatic example of a successful quantum field theory" (Weinberg (1995)). Ordinarily, quantum mechanics (QM) cannot give an account of photons which constitute the prime case of relativistic 'particles'. Since photons have rest mass zero, and correspondingly travel in the vacuum at the speed c, a non-relativistic theory such as ordinary QM cannot give even an approximate description. Photons are implicit in the emission and absorption processes which have to be postulated; for instance, when one of an atom's electrons makes a transition between energy levels. The formalism of QFT is needed for an explicit description of photons. In fact most topics in the early development of quantum theory (the so-called old quantum theory, 1900–25) were related to the interaction of radiation and matter and thus should be treated by quantum field theoretical methods. However, quantum mechanics as formulated by Dirac, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger in 1926–27 started from atomic spectra and did not focus much on problems of radiation.

As soon as the conceptual framework of quantum mechanics was developed, a small group of theoreticians tried to extend quantum methods to electromagnetic fields. A good example is the famous paper by Born, Jordan & Heisenberg (1926). (P. Jordan was especially acquainted with the literature on light quanta and made seminal contributions to QFT.) The basic idea was that in QFT the electromagnetic field should be represented by matrices in the same way that position and momentum were represented in QM by matrices (matrix mechanics oscillator operators). The ideas of QM were thus extended to systems having an infinite number of degrees of freedom, so an infinite array of quantum oscillators.

The inception of QFT is usually considered to be Dirac's famous 1927 paper on "The quantum theory of the emission and absorption of radiation". Here Dirac coined the name "quantum electrodynamics" (QED) for the part of QFT that was developed first. Dirac supplied a systematic procedure for transferring the characteristic quantum phenomenon of discreteness of physical quantities from the quantum-mechanical treatment of particles to a corresponding treatment of fields. Employing the theory of the quantum harmonic oscillator, Dirac gave a theoretical description of how photons appear in the quantization of the electromagnetic radiation field. Later, Dirac's procedure became a model for the quantization of other fields as well. These first approaches to QFT were further developed during the following three years. P. Jordan introduced creation and annihilation operators for fields obeying Fermi–Dirac statistics. These differ from the corresponding operators for Bose–Einstein statistics in that the former satisfy anti-commutation relations while the latter satisfy commutation relations.

The methods of QFT could be applied to derive equations resulting from the quantum-mechanical (field-like) treatment of particles, e.g. the Dirac equation, the Klein–Gordon equation and the Maxwell equations. Schweber points out that the idea and procedure of second quantization goes back to Jordan, in a number of papers from 1927, while the expression itself was coined by Dirac. Some difficult problems concerning commutation relations, statistics, and Lorentz invariance were eventually solved. The first comprehensive account of a general theory of quantum fields, in particular, the method of canonical quantization, was presented by Heisenberg & Pauli in 1929–30. Whereas Jordan's second quantization procedure applied to the coefficients of the normal modes of the field, Heisenberg & Pauli started with the fields themselves and subjected them to the canonical procedure. Heisenberg and Pauli thus established the basic structure of QFT as presented in modern introductions to QFT.
QFT take us and explain a different concept of universe I will explain also other theoreis of theoretical physics.

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