This volume contains the proceedings of the workshop “Crossing the Boundaries: Gauge Dynamics at Strong Coupling”, hosted by the William I. Fine Theoretical Physics Institute at the University of Minnesota, May 14 - 17, 2009. The workshop honored the 60th birthday of Professor Misha Shifman and his outstanding achievements in the field of gauge dynamics. The meeting attracted a fascinating group of researchers working on the cutting edge of dynamics of gauge theories, including supersymmetric and string theories. Their talks covered a wide area of recent developments in the field.

This book addresses the confinement problem, which concerns the behavior of non-abelian gauge theories, and the force which is mediated by gauge fields, at large distances. The word “confinement” in the context of hadronic physics originally referred to the fact that quarks and gluons appear to be trapped inside mesons and baryons, from which they cannot escape. There are other, and possibly deeper meanings that can be attached to the term, and these will be explored in this book. Although the confinement problem is far from solved, much is now known about the general features of the confining force, and there are a number of very well motivated theories of confinement which are under active investigation. This volume gives a both pedagogical and concise introduction and overview of the main ideas in this field, their attractive features, and, as appropriate, their shortcomings. This second edition summarizes some of the developments in this area which have occurred since the first edition of this book appeared in 2011. These include new results in the caloron/dyon picture of confinement, in functional approaches, and in studies of the Yang-Mills vacuum wave functional. Special attention, in two new chapters, is given to recent numerical investigations of the center vortex theory, and to the varieties of confinement which may exist in gauge-Higgs theories. Reviews of the first edition: “This is indeed a very good book. I enjoyed reading it and... I learned a lot from it.... It is definitely a research book that provides readers with a guide to the most updated confinement models.” (Giuseppe Nardelli, Mathematical Reviews, Issue 2012 d) “The book is beautifully produced with special emphasis on the relevance of center symmetry and lattice formulation as well as an introduction to current research on confinement.” (Paninjukunnath Achuthan, Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 1217, 2011)

This textbook gives a comprehensive summary of the gauge theories of the fundamental interactions. The authors stress the intimate connection between the basic experimental facts and the formulation of gauge theories of the strong and electroweak interaction. The concepts and technical tools of quantum field theory are presented. They are used to derive precision results of quantum chromodynamics and the standard model of the electroweak interaction of experiments in elementary particle physics. The book includes the latest experimental results and presents the actual status of the theory.

This 1983 book, reissued as OA, introduces the lattice approach to QFT for elementary particle and solid state physicists.

This volume is the most up-to-date review on Lattice Gauge Theories and Monte Carlo Simulations. It consists of two parts. Part one is an introductory lecture on the lattice gauge theories in general, Monte Carlo techniques and on the results to date. Part two consists of important original papers in this field. These selected reprints involve the following: Lattice Gauge Theories, General Formalism and Expansion Techniques, Monte Carlo Simulations. Phase Structures, Observables in Pure Gauge Theories, Systems with Bosonic Matter Fields, Simulation of Systems with Fermions.

This volume of lecture notes briefly introduces the basic concepts needed in any computational physics course: software and hardware, programming skills, linear algebra, and differential calculus. It then presents more advanced numerical methods to tackle the quantum many-body problem: it reviews the numerical renormalization group and then focuses on tensor network methods, from basic concepts to gauge invariant ones. Finally, in the last part, the author presents some applications of tensor network methods to equilibrium and out-of-equilibrium correlated quantum matter. The book can be used for a graduate computational physics course. After successfully completing such a course, a student should be able to write a tensor network program and can begin to explore the physics of many-body quantum systems. The book can also serve as a reference for researchers working or starting out in the field.