Abstract
A non technical introduction to the concept of renormalization is given, with an emphasis on the energy scale dependence in the description of a physical system. We first describe the idea of scale dependence in the study of a ferromagnetic phase transition, and then show how similar ideas appear in particle physics. This short review is written for non-particle physicists and/or students aiming at studying Particle Physics.
Keywords: renormalization, ferromagnetic phase transition, particle physics
Full Text
The Full Text of this article is available as a PDF (155.9 KB).
References
- 1.Wilson K. (1971) Renormalization group and critical phenomena 1: Renormalization group and the Kadanoff scaling picture. Phys. Rev., B4, 3174. [Google Scholar]
- 2.Wilson K. (1971) Renormalization group and critical phenomena 2: Phase space cell analysis of critical behaviour. Phys. Rev., B4, 3184. [Google Scholar]
- 3.Amit D. (1982) Field Theory, the Renormalization Group and Critical Phenomena. McGraw Hill. [Google Scholar]
- 4.Le Bellac M. (1992) Quantum and Statistical Field Theory, Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]
- 5.Gotfried K., and Weisskopf V. F. (1986) Concepts of Particle Physics, Vol. 1 (basic and qualitative concepts) and Vol. 2 (more technical), Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]
- 6.Collins J. (1984) Renormalization, Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]
- 7.Brown L. (1993) Renormalization, from Landau to Lorentz, Springer-Verlag. [Google Scholar]
- 8.Gockeler M., Horsley R., Linke V., Rakow P., Schierholz G., and Stuben H. (1998) Is there a Landau pole problem in QED?, Phys. Rev. Lett., 80, 4119. [Google Scholar]
- 9.Alexandre J., Polonyi J., and Sailer K. (2002) Functional Callan-Symanzik equations for QED. Phys. Lett., B531, 316. [Google Scholar]
- 10.Gies H., and Jaeckel J. (2004) Renormalization flow of QED. Phys. Rev. Lett., 93, 110405. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- 11.Polonyi J. (2004) Lectures on the functional renormalization group method. Central Eur. J. Phys., 1, 1. [Google Scholar]
- 12.Wegner F. J., and Houghton A. (1973) Renormalization group equation for critical phenomena. Phys. Rev., A8, 401. [Google Scholar]
- 13.Polchinski J. (1984) Renormalization and effective Lagrangians. Nucl. Phys., B231, 269. [Google Scholar]
- 14.Berges J., Tetradis N., and Wetterich C. (2002) Nonperturbative renormalization flow in quantum field theory and statistical physics. Phys. Rep., 363, 223. [Google Scholar]
- 15.Polonyi J., and Sailer K. (2005) Renormalization group in the internal space. Phys. Rev., D71, 025010. [Google Scholar]
- 16.Appelquist T., Bowick M., Karabali D., and Wijewardhana L. C. R. (1986) Spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in three dimensional QED. Phys. Rev., D33, 3704. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- 17.Alexandre J. (2004) An alternative approach to dynamical mass generation in QED3. Ann. Phys., 312, 273. [Google Scholar]
- 18.Sohnius M. (1985) Introducing supersymmetry. Phys. Rep., 128, 39. [Google Scholar]
