Overview

This book develops an approach to the quantum mechanics of identical particles that is relevant for many fields of physics. Based on the Green's function method it provides a unifying perspective not readily available in other approaches. Unlike many other books it contains a wealth of valuable experimental data, in particular results from direct knockout reactions directly related to the single-particle propagator in many-body theory. The comparison with data is incorporated from the start, making the abstract concept of propagators vivid and accessible. Results of numerical calculations using propagators or Green's functions are also included. The material has been thoroughly tested in the classroom and the introductory chapters provide a seamless connection with a one-year graduate course in quantum mechanics. While the majority of books on many-body theory deal with the subject from the viewpoint of condensed matter physics, this book emphasizes finite systems as well and should be of considerable interest to researchers in nuclear, atomic, and molecular physics. A unified treatment of many different many-body systems is presented using the approach of self-consistent Green's functions. An extensive presentation of finite temperature propagators is included which is unique to this method. In the third edition a new chapter covers the recent developments to extract the self-energy from experimental data obtained for nuclei, referred to as the dispersive optical model. This approach allows to generate predictions for hard to measure quantities like neutron distributions. Another new chapter describes the self-energy through a Faddeev summation of particle-particle and particle-hole propagators thereby leading to state of the art results for atoms, molecules, and nuclei. Other recent updates are contained in the third edition as well. The coverage proceeds systematically from elementary concepts, such as second quantization and mean-field properties, to a more advanced but self-contained presentation of the physics of atoms, molecules, nuclei, nuclear and neutron matter, electron gas, quantum liquids, atomic Bose-Einstein and fermion condensates, and pairing correlations in finite and infinite systems, including finite temperature.

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