Renormalization Methods : A Guide for Beginners

This book is unique in occupying a gap between standard undergraduate texts and more advanced texts on quantum field theory. It covers a range of renormalization methods with a clear physical interpretations (and motivation), including mean fields theories and high-temperature and low-density expansions. It then process by each steps to the famous epsilon expansion, ending up with the first-order corrections to critical exponents beyond mean-field theory. Nowadays there is widespread interest in applications of renormalization methods to various topics ranging over soft condensed matter, engineering dynamics, traffic queuing and fluctuations in the stock market. Hence macroscopic systems are also included with particular emphasis on the archetypal problem of fluid turbulence. The book is also unique in making this material accessible to readers other than theoretical physics, as it requires only the basic physics and mathematics which should be known to most scientists, engineers and mathematicians.