Colloquium: "Functional methods in QFT and renormalization, part I" by Dr. Riccardo Martini

Speaker: Dr. Martini is a member of this unit (check his page).

Abstract. Quantum field theory can be given a formulation using functional methods. Even though this approach is often (rigorously) ill-defined, its adavantage is two-fold: i) we can work with a functional generating all the correlators of the theory and; ii) we can make explicit the parallelism between quantum field theories and statistical field theories. In this first talk, we review the role of a partition function and of its logarithm (the free energy of the theory) and discuss how they generate n-point functions and connected n-point functions.