Trisep school notes

In the summer of 2018 I gave about 4.5 hours of lectures at the TRISEP summer school at the Perimeter Institute. The students in this school included both theorists and experimentalists. I am using this page to archive the lecture notes and videos for this course.

Lecture 1 Effective Field Theory Notes from the first class. The first class covered: Why do quantum calculations work?, the principles of EFT (locality, the energy expansion, matching/measuring), the linear sigma model, direct construction of the EFT, verification of the equivalence, EFT to one loop, renormalization, predictions and power counting. Video recording is here.

Lecture 2 Gravity from a particle physics perspective ( Notes here) and the Background Field Method (Notes here.) Higgs as mediator, need to use energy-momentum as source, energy-momentum from symmetry, gauge theory analogies for sources, gauging translation invariance, metric and its transformation, Success – energy momentum as source, covariant derivatives from symmetries, curvatures from covariant derivatives, actions for gravity, the weak field limit, gauge invariance and gauge fixing, the propagator, Feynman rules and ghost stories. For the background field method: Higgs example, QED example, general calculation of divergences, renormalizing the sigma model, comments about the heat kernel. Video recording is here.

Lecture 3 Here are the notes from the third lecture. We covered: Rules of EFT, Scalar loop, background field expansion for GR, gauge fixing, deriving the ghost Lagrangian, graviton loop result, the effect of the local terms, the correction to the gravitational potential, unitarity techniques, light bending, graviton scattering, beyond scattering amplitudes, Barvinsky Vilkovisky, limits to the effective field theory, extreme IR limits. Video recording is here.

Some exercises are found here.

Collected references and lectures