• • • In, quantum field theory ( QFT) is the theoretical framework for constructing models of in and in. It is a set of notions and mathematical tools that combines,, and, and, when combined with the, it may be the only way to do so, while retaining the ideas of and. QFT was historically widely believed to be truly fundamental.

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It is now believed, primarily due to the continued failures of quantization of, to be only a very good low-energy approximation, i.e. An, to some more fundamental theory. QFT treats particles as of the underlying, so these are called.

In quantum field theory, quantum mechanical interactions among particles are described by interaction terms among the corresponding underlying quantum fields. These interactions are conveniently visualized by, which are a formal tool of relativistically covariant, serving to evaluate particle processes. (1882–1970), one of the founders of quantum field theory. He is also known for the that introduced the probabilistic interpretation in quantum mechanics. He received the 1954 together with.

The first achievement of quantum field theory, namely (QED), is 'still the paradigmatic example of a successful quantum field theory' (). Ordinarily, quantum mechanics (QM) cannot give an account of photons which constitute the prime case of relativistic 'particles'. Since photons have rest mass zero, and correspondingly travel in the vacuum at the speed c, a non-relativistic theory such as ordinary QM cannot give even an approximate description.

Photons are implicit in the emission and absorption processes which have to be postulated; for instance, when one of an atom's electrons makes a transition between energy levels. The formalism of QFT is needed for an explicit description of photons.

In fact most topics in the early development of quantum theory (the so-called, 1900–25) were related to the interaction of radiation and matter and thus should be treated by quantum field theoretical methods. However, as formulated by,, and in 1926–27 started from atomic spectra and did not focus much on problems of radiation. As soon as the conceptual framework of quantum mechanics was developed, a small group of theoreticians tried to extend quantum methods to electromagnetic fields. A good example is the famous paper.

( was especially acquainted with the literature on light quanta and made seminal contributions to QFT.) The basic idea was that in QFT the electromagnetic field should be represented by matrices in the same way that position and momentum were represented in QM by matrices ( oscillator operators). The ideas of QM were thus extended to systems having an infinite number of degrees of freedom, so an infinite array of quantum oscillators. The inception of QFT is usually considered to be Dirac's famous 1927 paper on 'The quantum theory of the emission and absorption of radiation'. Here Dirac coined the name 'quantum electrodynamics' (QED) for the part of QFT that was developed first. Dirac supplied a systematic procedure for transferring the characteristic quantum phenomenon of discreteness of physical quantities from the quantum-mechanical treatment of particles to a corresponding treatment of fields.

Employing the theory of the, Dirac gave a theoretical description of how photons appear in the quantization of the electromagnetic radiation field. Later, Dirac's procedure became a model for the quantization of other fields as well. These first approaches to QFT were further developed during the following three years. Jordan introduced for fields obeying.

These differ from the corresponding operators for in that the former satisfy anti-commutation relations while the latter satisfy. The methods of QFT could be applied to derive equations resulting from the quantum-mechanical (field-like) treatment of particles, e.g.

The, the and the. Schweber points out that the idea and procedure of goes back to Jordan, in a number of papers from 1927, while the expression itself was coined by Dirac. Some difficult problems concerning commutation relations, statistics, and Lorentz invariance were eventually solved. The first comprehensive account of a general theory of quantum fields, in particular, the method of canonical quantization, was presented by Heisenberg & in 1929–30. Whereas Jordan's second quantization procedure applied to the coefficients of the of the field, Heisenberg & Pauli started with the fields themselves and subjected them to the canonical procedure. Heisenberg and Pauli thus established the basic structure of QFT as presented in modern introductions to QFT.

Fermi and Dirac, as well as and, presented different formulations which played a heuristic role in the following years. Quantum electrodynamics rests on two pillars, see e.g., the short and lucid 'Historical Introduction' of. The first pillar is the quantization of the electromagnetic field, i.e., it is about photons as the quantized excitations or 'quanta' of the electromagnetic field.

This procedure will be described in some more detail in the section on the particle interpretation. As Weinberg points out the 'photon is the only particle that was known as a field before it was detected as a particle' so that it is natural that QED began with the analysis of the radiation field.

The second pillar of QED consists of the relativistic theory of the electron, centered on the Dirac equation. The problem of infinities [ ] The emergence of infinities [ ]. (1902–1980), doctoral student of Max Born, was a pioneer in quantum field theory, coauthoring a number of seminal papers with Born and Heisenberg. Were introduced by him to formalize the notion of an algebra of in quantum mechanics. He was awarded the 1954. Quantum field theory started with a theoretical framework that was built in analogy to quantum mechanics.

Although there was no unique and fully developed theory, quantum field theoretical tools could be applied to concrete processes. Examples are the scattering of radiation by free electrons,, the collision between relativistic electrons or the production of electron-positron pairs by photons.

Calculations to the first order of approximation were quite successful, but most people working in the field thought that QFT still had to undergo a major change. On the one side, some calculations of effects for cosmic rays clearly differed from measurements. On the other side and, from a theoretical point of view more threatening, calculations of higher orders of the led to infinite results. The self-energy of the electron as well as of the electromagnetic field seemed to be infinite. The perturbation expansions did not converge to a finite sum and even most individual terms were divergent. The various forms of infinities suggested that the divergences were more than failures of specific calculations.

Many physicists tried to avoid the divergences by formal tricks (truncating the integrals at some value of momentum, or even ignoring infinite terms) but such rules were not reliable, violated the requirements of relativity and were not considered as satisfactory. Others came up with the first ideas for coping with infinities by a redefinition of the parameters of the theory and using a measured finite value, for example of the charge of the electron, instead of the infinite 'bare' value. This process is called. From the point of view of the philosophy of science, it is remarkable that these divergences did not give enough reason to discard the theory. The years from 1930 to the beginning of World War II were characterized by a variety of attitudes towards QFT. Some physicists tried to circumvent the infinities by more-or-less arbitrary prescriptions, others worked on transformations and improvements of the theoretical framework.

Most of the theoreticians believed that QED would break down at high energies. There was also a considerable number of proposals in favor of alternative approaches.

These proposals included changes in the basic concepts e.g. Negative probabilities and interactions at a distance instead of a field theoretical approach, and a methodological change to phenomenological methods that focusses on relations between observable quantities without an analysis of the microphysical details of the interaction, the so-called where the basic elements are amplitudes for various scattering processes.

Despite the feeling that QFT was imperfect and lacking rigor, its methods were extended to new areas of applications. In 1933 of the started with conceptions describing the emission and absorption of photons, transferred them to beta radiation and analyzed the creation and annihilation of electrons and neutrinos described by the. Further applications of QFT outside of quantum electrodynamics succeeded in nuclear physics with the. In 1934 Pauli & showed that a new type of field (the scalar field), described by the, could be quantized. This is another example of.

This new theory for matter fields could be applied a decade later when new particles,, were detected. The taming of infinities [ ]. (1901–1976), doctoral student of, was one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics and QFT. In particular, he introduced the version of quantum mechanics known as, but is now more known for the.

He was awarded the Nobel prize in physics 1932. After the end of World War II more reliable and effective methods for dealing with infinities in QFT were developed, namely coherent and systematic rules for performing relativistic field theoretical calculations, and a general renormalization theory. At three famous conferences, the 1947, the 1948, and the 1949, developments in theoretical physics were confronted with relevant new experimental results. In the late forties, there were two different ways to address the problem of divergences. Cpk Calculations In Excel Free Software on this page. One of these was discovered by, the other one (based on an operator formalism) by and, independently,.

In 1949, showed that the two approaches are in fact equivalent and fit into an elegant field-theoretic framework. Thus, Freeman Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga became the inventors of renormalization theory.

The most spectacular successes of renormalization theory were the calculations of the of the electron and the in the spectrum of hydrogen. These successes were so outstanding because the theoretical results were in better agreement with high-precision experiments than anything in physics encountered before. Nevertheless, mathematical problems lingered on and prompted a search for rigorous formulations (discussed below). The rationale behind renormalization is to avoid divergences that appear in physical predictions by shifting them into a part of the theory where they do not influence empirical statements.

Dyson could show that a rescaling of charge and mass ('renormalization') is sufficient to remove all divergences in QED consistently, to all orders of perturbation theory. A QFT is called renormalizable if all infinities can be absorbed into a redefinition of a finite number of coupling constants and masses. A consequence for QED is that the physical charge and mass of the electron must be measured and cannot be computed from first principles. Perturbation theory yields well-defined predictions only in renormalizable quantum field theories; luckily, QED, the first fully developed QFT, belonged to this class of renormalizable theories. There are various technical procedures to renormalize a theory.

One way is to cut off the integrals in the calculations at a certain value Λ of the momentum which is large but finite. This cut-off procedure is successful if, after taking the limit Λ → ∞, the resulting quantities are independent of Λ. (1918–1988) His 1945 PhD thesis developed the of ordinary quantum mechanics.

This was later generalized to field theory. Feynman's formulation of QED is of special interest from a philosophical point of view. His so-called space-time approach is visualized by the celebrated that look like depicting paths of particles. Feynman's method of calculating scattering amplitudes is based on the formulation of field theory. A set of graphical rules can be derived so that the probability of a specific scattering process can be calculated by drawing a diagram of that process and then using that diagram to write down the precise mathematical expressions for calculating its amplitude in relativistically covariant perturbation theory. The diagrams provide an effective way to organize and visualize the various terms in the perturbation series, and they naturally account for the flow of electrons and photons during the scattering process. External lines in the diagrams represent incoming and outgoing particles, internal lines are connected with and vertices with interactions.

Each of these graphical elements is associated with mathematical expressions that contribute to the amplitude of the respective process. The diagrams are part of Feynman's very efficient and elegant algorithm for computing the probability of scattering processes.

The idea of particles traveling from one point to another was heuristically useful in constructing the theory. This heuristic, based on, is useful for concrete calculations and actually gives the correct particle as derived more rigorously. Nevertheless, an analysis of the theoretical justification of the space-time approach shows that its success does not imply that particle paths need be taken seriously. General arguments against a particle interpretation of QFT clearly exclude that the diagrams represent actual paths of particles in the interaction area. Feynman himself was not particularly interested in ontological questions. The golden age: gauge theory and the standard model [ ]. 1929) articulator and pioneer of group symmetry in QFT In 1933, had already established that the creation, annihilation and transmutation of particles in the weak interaction could best be described in QFT, specifically his.

As a result, field theory had become a prospective tool for other particle interactions. In the beginning of the 1950s, QED had become a reliable theory which no longer counted as preliminary. However, it took two decades from writing down the first equations until QFT could be applied successfully to important physical problems in a systematic way. The theories explored relied on—indeed, were virtually fully specified by—a rich variety of pioneered and articulated. The new developments made it possible to apply QFT to new particles and new interactions and fully explain their structure. In the following decades, QFT was extended to well-describe not only the electromagnetic force but also and so that new Lagrangians were found which contain new classes of particles or quantum fields. The search still continues for a more comprehensive theory of matter and energy, a unified theory of all interactions.

(1921–2015), co-discoverer of field theoretic. The new focus on symmetry led to the triumph of non-Abelian (the development of such theories was pioneered in 1954–60 with the work of and; see ) and (by ). Today, there are reliable theories of the strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions of elementary particles which have an analogous structure to QED: They are the dominant framework of particle physics.

A combined renormalizable theory associated with the gauge group is dubbed the standard model of elementary particle physics (even though it is a full theory, and not just a model) and was assembled by, and in 1959–67 (see ), and, and in 1973 (see ), on the basis of conceptual breakthroughs by,,,, and. (b.1946) proved gauge field theories are renormalizable.

According to the standard model, there are, on the one hand, six types of (e.g. The and its ) and six types of, where the members of both groups are all fermions with spin 1/2. On the other hand, there are spin 1 particles (thus bosons) that mediate the interaction between elementary particles and the fundamental forces, namely the photon for electromagnetic interaction, two and one for weak interaction, and the for strong interaction. The linchpin of the symmetry breaking mechanism of the theory is the spin 0, discovered 40 years after its prediction. Renormalization group [ ].

Main article: Parallel breakthroughs in the understanding of in led to novel insights based on the. They emerged in the work of (1966) and & (1972) —extending the work of – (1953) and – (1954) —which led to the seminal reformulation of quantum field theory by Kenneth Geddes Wilson in 1975. This reformulation provided insights into the evolution of with scale, which classified all field theories, renormalizable or not (cf. Subsequent ). The remarkable conclusion is that, in general, most observables are 'irrelevant', i.e., the macroscopic physics is dominated by only a few observables in most systems.

During the same period, Kadanoff (1969) introduced an formalism for the two-dimensional, a widely studied mathematical model of in. This development suggested that quantum field theory describes its. Later, there developed the idea that a finite number of generating could represent all the of the Ising model. Conformal field theory [ ] The existence of a much stronger symmetry for the scaling limit of two-dimensional critical systems was suggested by, and in 1984, which eventually led to the development of, a special case of quantum field theory, which is presently utilized in different areas of particle physics and condensed matter physics. Historiography [ ] The first chapter in is a very good short description of the earlier history of QFT.

A detailed account of the historical development of QFT can be found in. Varieties of approaches [ ] Most theories in standard particle physics are formulated as relativistic quantum field theories, such as QED, QCD, and the. QED, the quantum field-theoretic description of the electromagnetic field, approximately reproduces 's theory of electrodynamics in the low-energy limit, with required due to electron–positron pairs. Perturbative and non-perturbative approaches [ ] In the approach to quantum field theory, the full field interaction terms are approximated as a perturbative expansion in the number of particles involved. Each term in the expansion can be thought of as forces between particles being mediated by other particles. In QED, the between two is caused by an exchange of. Similarly, mediate the and mediate the in QCD.

The notion of a force-mediating particle comes from, and does not make sense in the context of approaches to QFT, such as with. QFT and gravity [ ] There is currently no complete quantum theory of the remaining,.

Many of the to describe gravity as a QFT postulate the existence of a particle that mediates the gravitational force. Presumably, the as yet unknown correct quantum field-theoretic treatment of the gravitational field will behave like Einstein's in the low-energy limit. Quantum field theory of the fundamental forces itself has been postulated to be the low-energy limit of a more fundamental theory such as. Definition [ ] (QED) has one field and one field; (QCD) has one field for each type of; and, in condensed matter, there is an atomic displacement field that gives rise to particles. Describes QFT as 'by far' the most difficult theory in modern physics – 'so difficult that nobody fully believed it for 25 years.'

Dynamics [ ]. See also: Ordinary quantum mechanical systems have a fixed number of particles, with each particle having a finite number of. In contrast, the excited states of a quantum field can represent any number of particles. This makes quantum field theories especially useful for describing systems where the particle count/number may change over time, a crucial feature of relativistic dynamics. A QFT is thus an organized infinite array of oscillators.

States [ ] QFT interaction terms are similar in spirit to those between charges with electric and magnetic fields in. However, unlike the classical fields of Maxwell's theory, fields in QFT generally exist in of states and are subject to the laws of quantum mechanics. Because the fields are continuous quantities over space, there exist excited states with arbitrarily large numbers of particles in them, providing QFT systems with effectively an infinite number of degrees of freedom.

Infinite degrees of freedom can easily lead to of calculated quantities (e.g., the quantities become infinite). Techniques such as of QFT parameters or discretization of, as in, are often used to avoid such infinities so as to yield physically plausible results. Fields and radiation [ ] The and the are the only two fundamental fields in nature that have infinite range and a corresponding classical low-energy limit, which greatly diminishes and hides their 'particle-like' excitations. In 1905, attributed 'particle-like' and discrete exchanges of momenta and energy, characteristic of 'field quanta', to the electromagnetic field. Siemens Olb Pspice Download Student here.

Originally, his principal motivation was to explain the of. Although the and strongly suggest the existence of the photon, it might alternatively be explained by a mere quantization of emission; more definitive evidence of the quantum nature of radiation is now taken up into modern as in the effect. Principles [ ] Classical and quantum fields [ ]. Main article: Early in the history of quantum field theory, as detailed above, it was found that many seemingly innocuous calculations, such as the shift in the energy of an electron due to the presence of the electromagnetic field, yield infinite results. The reason is that the perturbation theory for the shift in an energy involves a sum over all other energy levels, and there are infinitely many levels at short distances, so that each gives a finite contribution which results in a divergent series. Many of these problems are related to failures in that were identified but unsolved in the 19th century, and they basically stem from the fact that many of the supposedly 'intrinsic' properties of an electron are tied to the electromagnetic field that it carries around with it.

The energy carried by a single electron—its —is not simply the bare value, but also includes the energy contained in its electromagnetic field, its attendant cloud of photons. The energy in a field of a spherical source diverges in both classical and quantum mechanics, but as discovered by with help from, in quantum mechanics the divergence is much milder, going only as the logarithm of the radius of the sphere. The solution to the problem, presciently suggested by, independently by after the crucial experiment by and (the ), implemented at one loop by, and systematically extended to all loops by and, with converging work by in isolated postwar Japan, comes from recognizing that all the infinities in the interactions of photons and electrons can be isolated into redefining a finite number of quantities in the equations by replacing them with the observed values: specifically the electron's mass and charge: this is called. The technique of renormalization recognizes that the problem is tractable and essentially purely mathematical; and that, physically, extremely short distances are at fault. In order to define a theory on a continuum, one may first place a on the fields, by postulating that quanta cannot have energies above some extremely high value.

This has the effect of replacing continuous space by a structure where very short wavelengths do not exist, as on a lattice. Lattices break rotational symmetry, and one of the crucial contributions made by Feynman, Pauli and Villars, and modernized by and, is a symmetry-preserving cutoff for perturbation theory (this process is called ).

There is no known symmetrical cutoff outside of perturbation theory, so for rigorous or numerical work people often use an actual. On a lattice, every quantity is finite but depends on the spacing. When taking the limit to zero spacing, one makes sure that the physically observable quantities like the observed electron mass stay fixed, which means that the constants in the Lagrangian defining the theory depend on the spacing.

By allowing the constants to vary with the lattice spacing, all the results at long distances become insensitive to the lattice, defining a. The renormalization procedure only works for a certain limited class of quantum field theories, called renormalizable quantum field theories. A theory is perturbatively renormalizable when the constants in the Lagrangian only diverge at worst as logarithms of the lattice spacing for very short spacings. The continuum limit is then well defined in perturbation theory, and even if it is not fully well defined non-perturbatively, the problems only show up at distance scales that are exponentially small in the inverse coupling for weak couplings. The of is perturbatively renormalizable, and so are its component theories (/ and ).

Of the three components, quantum electrodynamics is believed to not have a continuum limit by itself, while the SU(2) and SU(3) weak and strong color interactions are nonperturbatively well defined. The as developed along breakthrough insights relates at a given scale to such at contiguous scales. It thus describes how renormalizable theories emerge as the long distance low-energy for any given high-energy theory.

As a consequence, renormalizable theories are insensitive to the precise nature of the underlying high-energy short-distance phenomena (the macroscopic physics is dominated by only a few 'relevant' observables). This is a blessing in practical terms, because it allows physicists to formulate low energy theories without detailed knowledge of high-energy phenomena. It is also a curse, because once a renormalizable theory such as the standard model is found to work, it provides very few clues to higher-energy processes. The only way high-energy processes can be seen in the standard model is when they allow otherwise forbidden events, or else if they reveal predicted compelling quantitative relations among the coupling constants of the theories or models. On account of renormalization, the couplings of QFT vary with scale, thereby confining quarks into hadrons, allowing the study of weakly-coupled quarks inside hadrons, and enabling speculation on ultra-high energy behavior. See also: Gauge freedom [ ] A is a theory that admits a with a local parameter. For example, in every theory, the global of the is arbitrary and does not represent something physical.

Consequently, the theory is invariant under a global change of phases (adding a constant to the phase of all wave functions, everywhere); this is a. In, the theory is also invariant under a local change of phase, that is – one may shift the phase of all so that the shift may be different at every point in space-time. This is a local symmetry. However, in order for a well-defined operator to exist, one must introduce a new, the, which also transforms in order for the local change of variables (the phase in our example) not to affect the derivative. In quantum electrodynamics, this gauge field is the.

The change of local gauge of variables is termed. By, for every such symmetry there exists an associated.

The aforementioned symmetry of the wavefunction under global phase changes implies the. Since the excitations of fields represent, the particle associated with excitations of the is the, e.g., the in the case of quantum electrodynamics. The in quantum field theory are local fluctuations of the fields. The existence of a gauge symmetry reduces the number of degrees of freedom, simply because some fluctuations of the fields can be transformed to zero by gauge transformations, so they are equivalent to having no fluctuations at all, and they, therefore, have no physical meaning. Such fluctuations are usually called 'non-physical degrees of freedom' or gauge artifacts; usually, some of them have a negative, making them inadequate for a consistent theory.

Therefore, if a classical field theory has a gauge symmetry, then its quantized version (the corresponding quantum field theory) will have this symmetry as well. In other words, a gauge symmetry cannot have a quantum. In general, the gauge transformations of a theory consist of several different transformations, which may not be. These transformations are combine into the framework of a; are the. Thus, the number of gauge bosons is the group (i.e., the number of generators forming the of the corresponding Lie algebra).

All the known in nature are described by gauge theories (possibly barring the Higgs multiplet couplings, if considered in isolation). These are: •, whose is.

The are eight. • The, whose is U(1) × SU(2), (a of U(1) and ). The gauge bosons are the photon and the massive W ± and Z⁰ bosons. •, whose classical theory is, relies on the, which is essentially a form of gauge symmetry. Its action may also be written as a gauge theory of the on. Supersymmetry [ ]. Main article: assumes that every fundamental has a superpartner that is a and vice versa.

Its gauge theory,, is an extension of general relativity. Supersymmetry is a key ingredient for the consistency of. It was utilized in order to solve the so-called of the standard model, that is, to explain why particles not protected by any symmetry (like the ) do not receive radiative corrections to their mass, driving it to the larger scales such as that of GUTs, or the Planck mass of gravity. The way supersymmetry protects scale hierarchies is the following: since for every particle there is a superpartner with the same mass but different statistics, any loop in a radiative correction is cancelled by the loop corresponding to its superpartner, rendering the theory more UV finite. Since, however, no super partners have been observed, if supersymmetry existed it should be broken severely (through a so-called soft term, which breaks supersymmetry without ruining its helpful features).

The simplest models of this breaking require that the energy of the superpartners not be too high; in these cases, supersymmetry could be observed by experiments at the. However, to date, after the observation of the Higgs boson there, no such superparticles have been discovered. Axiomatic approaches [ ] The preceding description of quantum field theory follows the spirit in which most approach the subject. However, it is not. Over the past several decades, there have been many attempts to put quantum field theory on a firm mathematical footing by formulating a set of for it.

Finding proper axioms for quantum field theory is still an open and difficult problem in mathematics. One of the —proving the existence of a —is linked to this issue. These attempts fall into two broad classes. Wightman axioms [ ]. Main article: The first class of axioms, first proposed during the 1950s, include the,, and systems. They attempted to formalize the physicists' notion of an 'operator-valued field' within the context of and enjoyed limited success. It was possible to prove that any quantum field theory satisfying these axioms satisfied certain general theorems, such as the and the.

Unfortunately, it proved extraordinarily difficult to show that any realistic field theory, including the, satisfied these axioms. Most of the theories that could be treated with these analytic axioms were physically trivial, being restricted to low-dimensions and lacking interesting dynamics. The construction of theories satisfying one of these sets of axioms falls in the field of. Important work was done in this area in the 1970s by Segal, Glimm, Jaffe and others. Topological quantum field theory [ ].

Main article: During the 1980s, the second set of axioms based on ideas was proposed. Before 1980 all states of matter could be classified by and the principle of. For example theory of is based on the geometrical curvature of space and time, while crystals, magnets and superconductors can all be classified by the symmetries they break.

In 1980 the provided the first example of a state of matter that has no spontaneous broken symmetry; its characterization is dependant on its and not on its (See ). The quantum Hall effect can be described by extending quantum field theory into an based on the. This line of investigation, which extends quantum field theories to, is associated most closely with and, and was notably expanded upon by,, and. The main impact of topological quantum field theory has been in where physicists have observed exotic quasiparticles such as and.

Topological field considerations could have radical applications in a new form of electronics called and. The allows for topological terms but is generally not formulated as a topological quantum field theory.

Topological quantum field theory has also had broad impact in mathematics, with important applications in,, and. Haag's theorem [ ].

• • • The path integral formulation of is a description of quantum theory that generalizes the of. It replaces the classical notion of a single, unique classical trajectory for a system with a sum, or, over an infinity of quantum-mechanically possible trajectories to compute a. This formulation has proven crucial to the subsequent development of, because manifest (time and space components of quantities enter equations in the same way) is easier to achieve than in the operator formalism of.

Unlike previous methods, the path integral allows a physicist to easily change between very different descriptions of the same quantum system. Another advantage is that it is in practice easier to guess the correct form of the of a theory, which naturally enters the path integrals (for interactions of a certain type, these are coordinate space or Feynman path integrals), than the.

Possible downsides of the approach include that (this is related to conservation of probability; the probabilities of all physically possible outcomes must add up to one) of the is obscure in the formulation. The path-integral approach has been proved to be equivalent to the other formalisms of quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. Thus, by deriving either approach from the other, problems associated with one or the other approach (as exemplified by Lorentz covariance or unitarity) go away.

The path integral also relates quantum and processes, and this provided the basis for the grand synthesis of the 1970s, which unified with the of a fluctuating field near a. The is a with an imaginary diffusion constant, and the path integral is an of a method for summing up all possible. The basic idea of the path integral formulation can be traced back to, who introduced the for solving problems in diffusion and. This idea was extended to the use of the in quantum mechanics by in his 1933 article. The complete method was developed in 1948. Some preliminaries were worked out earlier in his doctoral work under the supervision of.

The original motivation stemmed from the desire to obtain a quantum-mechanical formulation for the using a (rather than a ) as a starting point.