Download or read book Statistical Field Theory: Volume 1, From Brownian Motion to Renormalization and Lattice Gauge Theory written by Claude Itzykson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1989-09-29 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive and timely survey of the application of the methods of quantum field theory to statistical physics, a very active and fruitful area of modern research, is provided in two volumes. The first volume provides a pedagogical introduction to the subject, discussing Brownian motion, its anticommutative counterpart in the guise of Onsager's solution to the two-dimensional Ising model, the mean field or Landau approximation, scaling ideas exemplified by the Kosterlitz-Thouless theory for the XY transition, the continuous renormalization group applied to the standard phi-to-the-fourth theory (the simplest typical case) and lattice gauge theory as a pathway to the understanding of quark confinement in quantum chromodynamics.