Erickson’s Reviews > Quantum Fields in Curved Space > Status Update

Finished Section 5.1 somewhat; it's mostly just derivations for FRW case and it's pointless to memorize the details since it's as pointless as memorizing components of Riemann tensor. The main takeaway is that the conformal weight does not vanish in 4 dimensions.

Finished Chapter 4; I need to re-think about the Unruh effect part where the analyticity argument has been used. It's not clear to me why that argument implies particle creation.

Finished 4.1-4.3. It's mostly dirty calculations so there is nothing much to learn from the gory details. However, one thing that bugged me was the method to obtain the Wightman function via method of images; I know that if we found the right one, it -has- to be; but I don't know how this would work for other boundary conditions.

Finished Chapter 3, skimming through higher spin cases. Moral of the story: this book is bad for learning; only good when you are sufficiently expert. Even for me who has some basics, going through this book is painful. It is true though that it is trying to be thorough (though I suspect now books by Parker and others are probably better)

Midway into Section 3.5 on adiabatic vacuum and finished 2D FRW example. Took me a while to realize that the "solvability" of the ODE of auxiliary function of conformal time relies on the nice property of the scale factor, and why the Bogoliubov coeff. looked like they did. I still struggle with those handwaving argument about "uncertainty" in particle number; they are so heuristic I had a hard time trusting it.

Finished the particle detector part (section 3.3). This time I tried to go through most of the calculations, and a nice surprise is a identity involving infinite sum equal to cosec(x). This is a nice result obtained from residue theorem in complex analysis.

Stopped at section 3.2. Need to try and understand what it means for a vacuum to be Poincare-invariant.

Finished skimming chapter 2. The path integral and Green's function section really requires familiarity with standard QFT so one cannot expect to understand this chapter completely without being familiar with (1) canonical quantization and (2) Green's functions and kernels of the wave equation or Dirac equation.

Restarting this for my comprehensive exams (first five chapters). I guess I find this book too old, but it is not a bad feeling especially when the authors actually tried to make this pedagogical (contrary to my original bias). I guess the laundry list of references are for exotic stuff. I should complement this with other resources just to be safe.