![]() Mukhanov did a very good job actually (contrary to what I heard from others), but it's true that Mukhanov's textbook somehow left you with the sense that you understand some of the basic features really well but yet you don't really know anything more than the -very- bare basics. I seriously think this field - QFT in curved spacetimes - need better pedagogical textbooks. ![]() ![]() However, for the stuff I needed, Tom and Parker did not cover much as they focused much on stress-energy tensors and renormalization. There are more modern resources Parker and Tom's book is particularly nice (from what I heard). So I don't know if I would rate this book as great I think it's not worth 4-star, but there's no 3.5 star so I would lean on giving 3 than 4. The cosmological spacetime examples (including de Sitter) were helpful, but they were helpful insofar as you have easy access to solutions of highly non-trivial differential equations (I have Mathematica so it's fine). I get the motivations but I doubt I got any working knowledge out of it. I find the exposition about adiabatic vacuum very confusing in Chapter 3, so much so that it did not help me clarify conceptually why it's as important as conformal vacuum or any other vacuum. What follows is probably personal opinion that depends strongly on my own abilities (which may not be the same for everyone). I should also say that Chapter 2, first three sections of Chapter 3, and Chapter 8 are actually really nice. ![]() In fact, my first impression was that the book covered all there is to cover for this field, and there's probably nothing much left to be investigated. However, it certainly did well -as a monograph- in serving as a reference text on what has been done or can be done in the field. It's too old, possibly outdated, and as a monograph it's more like a collection of results which are rather difficult to follow. Overall, I cannot say that I learnt very useful things from this book, from the perspective of a "student". Chapter 6 on calculating the stress tensor and chapter 9 on dealing with interactions are also unparalleled in terms of clarity of explanation and attention to detail which make them essential for someone who wishes to perform these kinds of computations in practice.įinished first five chapters (which is what I needed for comprehensive exams) and also I had read Chapter 8 as part of my own research. Their discussion of particle detectors is brilliant, very physically motivated and really helps the reader in believing in these phenomena. Which is a shame given a lot of contemporary research on QFT in curved spacetime is motivated by inflation.The physics in chapters 4 and 5 is also quite uninteresting (at least from my point of view), however, some techniques developed here are used later on, so they can't be skipped. Also, it doesn't mention inflation at all. It's view of renormalisation is very much based on cancelling infinities rather than Wilsonian RG. The main disadvantage of this book is that it is quite outdated in places. The explanations are quite clear and they go over many explicit examples in a lot of detail so it's a great reference to learn how to compute things. It covers just about anything you might need to use in actual research. This is the go-to book to learn about QFT in curved spacetime.
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