World Scientific Publishing Company Releases Book by Professor Ashok Das

October 9, 2008

In September, World Scientific Publishing Company released Professor Ashok Das' new book, Lectures on Quantum Field Theory. Aimed at graduate students and researchers in theoretical physics, the book consists of the lectures for a two-semester course on quantum field theory. According to the publisher, "The course starts with relativistic one-particle systems, and develops the basics of quantum field theory with an analysis of the representations of the Poincare group. Canonical quantization is carried out for scalar, fermion, Abelian and non-Abelian gauge theories. Covariant quantization of gauge theories is also carried out with a detailed description of the BRST symmetry. The Higgs phenomenon and the standard model of electroweak interactions are also developed systematically. Regularization and (BPHZ) renormalization of field theories as well as gauge theories are discussed in detail, leading to a derivation of the renormalization group equation. In addition, two chapters -- one on the Dirac quantization of constrained systems and another on discrete symmetries -- are included for completeness, although these are not covered in the two-semester course."

Professor Das received his BS (1972) and MS (1974) in Physics from the University of Delhi, India and his PhD in Physics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1977. He was a Research Associate at the City College of New York, the University of Maryland, and Rutgers University before joining the University of Rochester in 1982 as Assistant Professor of Physics. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1986 and to Professor in 1993. He has received the Department Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching four times (1987, 1990, 1997, and 2006), the Edward Peck Curtis Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (1991), and the 2006 University Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching. He was named a Department of Energy Outstanding Junior Investigator (1983-1989) and received a Rockefeller Foundation Award in 2004. He received Fulbright Fellowships twice, one in 1997 and one in 2006. Professor Das was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2002.

Professor Das' research is in the area of Theoretical High-Energy Physics. His research has focused on questions of symmetry in the fundamental laws of nature. In recent years, he has worked extensively on nonlinear integrable systems -- systems that, despite of their complicated appearance, can be exactly solved. He has also been working on finite temperature field theories, generalization of the Standard Model to incorporate CP violation, and problems in quantum field theory and string theory.