"Providing a new perspective on quantum field theory, this book gives a pedagogical and up-to-date exposition of non-perturbative methods in relativistic quantum field theory and introduces the reader to modern research work in theoretical physics. It describes in detail non-perturbative methods in quantum field theory, and explores two- dimensional and four- dimensional gauge dynamics using those methods. The book concludes with a summary emphasizing the interplay between two- and four- dimensional gauge theories. Aimed at graduate students and researchers, this book covers topics from two-dimensional conformal symmetry, affine Lie algebras, solitons, integrable models, bosonization, and 't Hooft model, to four-dimensional conformal invariance, integrability, large N expansion, Skyrme model, monopoles and instantons. Applications, first to simple field theories and gauge dynamics in two dimensions, and then to gauge theories in four dimensions and quantum chromodynamics (QCD) in particular, are thoroughly described"--Provided by publisher.

"Field theory is the framework with which one describes the theory of the standard model of elementary particles and their interactions. The electromagnetic sector (QED) of the standard model is understood extremely well using perturbation theory, but the color interaction (QCD) which is responsible for hadron physics can only be accounted for perturbatively for a limited set of observational data. Due to the fact that at long distances the color interaction is strongly coupled, one cannot reliably apply perturbative methods to extract, for instance, the spectrum of the hadrons. The arsenal of tools to handle strongly coupled systems is obviously much more limited than the one used for weakly coupled ones. Nevertheless, several methods to handle non-perturbative field theories have been developed. The main goal of this book is to expose the reader to those techniques and to describe their applications in two-dimensional and four-dimensional field theories and finally in QCD in four dimensions"--Provided by publisher.