Scribd
Upload
3 views

hw221b.1

Uploaded by

Devang Bajpai
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
3 views

hw221b.1

Uploaded by

Devang Bajpai
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 1

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA

Department of Physics

Physics 221A Quantum Field Theory Winter 2015

Prof: Joe Polchinski [email protected]

ASSIGNMENT #1
Due: Weds., Jan. 21, in class.

Unfortunately it has not been possible to find a grader, so my plan will be to look over
the homeworks to see how well things are understood, and prepare some solution sets, at
least for the key problems. Grades will be based primarily on the final exam, and also on
handing in reasonably complete homeworks. The important point is that the main way
that you learn any subject, and QFT in particular, is to do calculations, so you should do
as many as you can, even if they are not graded.
Mostly simple ‘verify’ type problems:
1. Srednicki 33.2
2. Srednicki 34.1
3. Srednicki 34.2
4. Srednicki 35.4
5. Srednicki 36.5 (parts a,d,e only, I am skipping most of the Majorana notation).
6. Show that γ5 defined in 36.46 has the properties γ52 = I and {γ5 , γµ } = 0 (note that
the latter is equivalent to γ5 γµ = −γµ γ5 ).
7. Show that the Dirac equation implies that ∂µ (Ψγ µ Ψ) = 0 for a Dirac spinor.
Sorry that these are a bit boring, I will try to be more creative next time.

There are some interesting homework problems that are not in the main line of the
course and they are not assigned, but they illustrate points that are useful to be aware of:
33.1: Separating a two-index tensor into traceless-symmetric, antisymmetric, and scalar
parts.
34.3: Two Levi-Civita tensors are equivalent to none. Hint: for 34.44 check the special
cases µ, ν, ρ = 1, 2, 3 and µ, ν, ρ = 0, 1, 2, and argue that this is enough.
34.4: Why is this true?
36.4: You already did a special case of this last quarter (HW 9, #5), this is just more
general.

You might also like