Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute constructively to the encyclopedia, adding content without citing a reliable source is not consistent with our policy of verifiability. Take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. If you are familiar with Wikipedia:Citing sources, please take this opportunity to add references to the article. Thank you. 98.248.33.198 (talk) 06:32, 18 October 2009 (UTC)Reply

Candlin

edit

Please be more specific when you say Candlin's theory is incomplete. This is not true. It is a complete treatment of a fermionic field in terms of path-integrals, and it is completely modern in showing that the sum-over-states is equivalent to the integral over anticommuting variables, when "integral" means the usual new-fangled thing for these objects. It shows translation invariance, and interprets the variables as coherent states of the field. It is a very complete treatement, and I am mystified about your reasons for thinking that it is not a full theory.Likebox (talk) 16:50, 18 October 2009 (UTC)Reply

I have to say--- I haven't read Khalatnikov, and this is a big gap. I didn't even know about his contribution to these developments before you brought them up. It seems that Berezin developed his ideas from Khalatnikov, not Candlin.
This is all subject to debate and interpretation, of course, and I am not trying to impose an opinion--- but I am trying to be a "lawyer" for Candlin, because of all the authors, he is the least recognized. Khalatnikov has famous work on He4, Salam has a nobel prize, Berezin has the objects named after him, and Schwinger/Feynman are so famous that it is hardly necessary to mention their contributions.
The thing that struck me about Candlin's paper is that he defines the Grassman algebra as coherent states on the Fock space for the Fermions. So that |0> + \xi|1> is the coherent state for a Fermionic mode which can be empty (|0>) or full (|1>). From this, he then defines the integral over \xi so that it is translation invariant (\int 1 d\xi = 0 \int \xi d\xi = 1), and then shows that the integral over the full Fermionic variables of exp(iS) gives you the sum over all intermediate states of the Fermi action. These are the three main theorems, and I did not see them elsewhere earlier.Likebox (talk) 21:32, 23 October 2009 (UTC)Reply