Teaching

On this page, I collect an archive of various courses which I have taught. Because I am retired from regular teaching at UMass, the more recent entries are lectures given at various schools.

Nordic Winter School In January 2019, I gave 4 hours of lectures at the Nordic Winter School. Notes are here.

TRISEP summer school In the summer of 2018, I gave 4.5 hours of lectures on GR as a QFT and as an EFT at the TRISEP school at the Perimeter Institute. The lecture notes and video are here.

EPFL lectures – General Relativity as a Quantum Field Theory

In Fall 2016, I gave 14 hours of lectures on this topic at EPFL in Lausanne. The home page for the course is at my GRQFT web site., where I posted notes and references.

Schrodinger lectures at the University of Vienna

I gave the 2015 Schrodinger lectures on treating General Relativity as a quantum effective field theory.

The first lecture was a colloquium for a general audience. The slides are here.

Oct 20: Constructing GR as a gauge theory – – Notes.

Oct 27: Treating quantum GR as an effective field theory – – Notes

Nov 3: Low energy theorems of quantum gravity and frontier directions. Notes

I post some relevant references on a separate reference page.

General Relativity as a Quantum Field Theory

In Spring 2015, I taught P852, a course on the Quantum Field Theory approach to General Relativity (which was also a QFT II course), treating GR in the same way as our other fundamental interactions. Here is a link to the course web page.

Zuoz summer school – August 2014

In 2014, I taught at the Zuoz summer school “More than the Higgs – effective theories for particle physics”, sponsored by PSI. This was a group of student in both theoretical and experimental areas. I gave the overall introduction to EFT and then a final lecture on using EFT for general relativity. The lecture notes are here.

Effective Field Theory and Quantum Gravity

In 2013 I gave lectures on Effective Field Theory and Quantum General Relativity at the Saalberg summer school on theoretical physics. The link provides the notes and recorded lectures from that school.

Quantum Field Theory I.

This is a basic introduction to field theory suitable for students of all disciplines. A list of topics covered is available here. The notes and videos of the course are available here. These are not exactly the way that I teach the course now, but roughly cover the same material.

Quantum Field Theory II

This is a second semester following the QFT I course above. It was designed mainly for particle theory students. The summary of that course is given here. The notes and video can be found on a separate archive page.

The Standard Model

This is a course on the structure and phenomenology of the Standard Model, taught using field theory. It was given in the spring of 2012. The course contents are here. There is an archive page for this course, which contains links to the lecture notes and videos of the lectures.

Living in the Multiverse

Just for fun, here is a recording of a talk that I gave in Guy Blaylock’s Big Bang to Black Holes course on Is this the best of all possible universes? – Living in the Multiverse

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Research and teaching pages for John Donoghue