A study of gauge field theories and gravitation in the first-order formalism

Abstract

The main objective of this project is to enable the student with the training and basic knowledge on some of the topics of field theory and gravitation that form the conceptual basis of fundamental physics. Following the study of the classical theories invariant under gauge transformations (including gravity), Feynman's path integral approach will be used to obtain the quantum behavior and to extract some of the physical consequences. Subsequently, we will investigate important aspects of the equivalence between the first and second-order formalisms, both at the classical and the quantum level. As a simple application, we will compute scattering amplitudes to examine the formal equivalence explicitly.(AU)