The importance and the beauty of modern quantum field theory resides in the power and variety of its methods and ideas, which find application in domains as different as particle physics, cosmology, condensed matter, statistical mechanics and critical phenomena. This book introduces the reader to the modern developments, assuming no previous knowledge of quantum field theory. Along with standard topics like Feynman diagrams, the book discusses effective lagrangians, renormalization group equations, the path integral formulation, spontaneous symmetry breaking and non-abelian gauge theories. The inclusion of more advanced topics will also make this a most useful book for graduate students and researchers.

"The author gives a nice conceptual discussion of divergences in loop amplitudes, the need to renormalize, and how both renormalization group...he manages to convery the main ideas without getting lost in technical details." - Physics Today

"All in all, Maggiore's approach is precisely the one that should be taken in an undergraduate course: Introduce the "big" ideas and leave the computational and thornier technical details for subsequent courses." - Physics Today

"A Modern Introduction to Quantum Field Theory provides useful information. Books in the Oxford Master Series in Statistical, Computational and Theoretical Physics are aimed at final-year undergraduate and begining postgraduate students, providing straightforward introduction to key topics in physics. This book satifies these goals very well." - The Times Higher, December 2005.