Quantum field theory (QFT) provides a theoretical framework for constructing quantum

mechanical models of systems classically parametrized (represented) by an infinite number of

dynamical degrees of freedom, that is, fields and (in a condensed matter context) many-body
systems. It is the natural and quantitative language of particle physics and condensed matter
physics. Most theories in modern particle physics, including the Standard Model of elementary
particles and their interactions, are formulated as relativistic quantum field theories. Quantum
field theories are used in many contexts, elementary particle physics being the most vital
example, where the particle count/number going into a reaction fluctuates and changes, differing
from the count/number going out, for example, and for the description of critical phenomena and
quantum phase transitions, such as in the BCS theory of superconductivity, also see phase
transition, quantum phase transition, critical phenomena. Quantum field theory is thought by
many to be the unique and correct outcome of combining the rules of quantum mechanics with
special relativity.

In perturbative quantum field theory, the forces between particles are mediated by other
particles. The electromagnetic force between two electrons is caused by an exchange of photons.
Intermediate vector bosons mediate the weak force and gluons mediate the strong force. There is
currently no complete quantum theory of the remaining fundamental force, gravity, but many of
the proposed theories postulate the existence of a graviton particle that mediates it. These force-
carrying particles are virtual particles and, by definition, cannot be detected while carrying the
force, because such detection will imply that the force is not being carried. In addition, the notion
of "force mediating particle" comes from perturbation theory, and thus does not make sense in a
context of bound states.

In QFT photons are not thought of as 'little billiard balls', they are considered to be field quanta -
necessarily chunked ripples in a field, or "excitations," that 'look like' particles. Fermions, like
the electron, can also be described as ripples/excitations in a field, where each kind of fermion
has its own field. In summary, the classical visualisation of "everything is particles and fields," in
quantum field theory, resolves into "everything is particles," which then resolves into
"everything is fields." In the end, particles are regarded as excited states of a field (field quanta).
The gravitational field and the electromagnetic field are the only two fundamental fields in
Nature that have infinite range and a corresponding classical low-energy limit, which greatly
diminishes and hides their "particle-like" excitations. Albert Einstein, in 1905, attributed
"particle-like" and discrete exchanges of momenta and energy, characteristic of "field quanta," to
the electromagnetic field. Originally, his principal motivation was to explain the
thermodynamics of radiation. Although it is often claimed that the photoelectric and Compton
effects require a quantum description of the EM field, this is now understood to be untrue, and
proper proof of the quantum nature of radiation is now taken up into modern quantum optics as
in the antibunching effect[2]. The word "photon" was coined in 1926 by the great physical
chemist Gilbert Newton Lewis (see also the articles photon antibunching and laser).

The "low-energy limit" of the correct quantum field-theoretic description of the electromagnetic
field, quantum electrodynamics, is believed to become James Clerk Maxwell's 1864 theory,
although the "classical limit" of quantum electrodynamics has not been as widely explored as
that of quantum mechanics. Presumably, the as yet unknown correct quantum field-theoretic
treatment of the gravitational field will become and "look exactly like" Einstein's general theory
of relativity in the "low-energy limit." Indeed, quantum field theory itself is possibly the low-
energy-effective-field-theory limit of a more fundamental theory such as superstring theory.
Compare in this context the article effective field theory.

Quantum field theory originated in the 1920s from the problem of creating a quantum
mechanical theory of the electromagnetic field. In 1925 Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and
Pascual Jordan constructed such a theory by expressing the field's internal degrees of freedom as
an infinite set of harmonic oscillators and by employing the usual procedure for quantizing those
oscillators. This theory assumed that no electric charges or currents were present, and today
would be called a free field theory. The first reasonably complete theory of quantum
electrodynamics, which included both the electromagnetic field and electrically charged matter
(specifically, electrons) as quantum mechanical objects, was created by Paul Dirac in 1927.[3]
This quantum field theory could be used to model important processes such as the emission of a
photon by an electron dropping into a quantum state of lower energy, a process in which the
number of particles changes — one atom in the initial state becomes an atom plus a photon in
the final state. It is now understood that the ability to describe such processes is one of the most
important features of quantum field theory.

It was evident from the beginning that a proper quantum treatment of the electromagnetic field
had to somehow incorporate Einstein's relativity theory, which had after all grown out of the
study of classical electromagnetism. This need to put together relativity and quantum mechanics
was the second major motivation in the development of quantum field theory. Pascual Jordan
and Wolfgang Pauli showed in 1928 that quantum fields could be made to behave in the way
predicted by special relativity during coordinate transformations (specifically, they showed that
the field commutators were Lorentz invariant). A further boost for quantum field theory came
with the discovery of the Dirac equation, which was originally formulated and interpreted as a
single-particle equation analogous to the Schrödinger equation, but unlike the Schrödinger
equation, the Dirac equation satisfies both Lorentz invariance, that is, the requirements of special
relativity, and the rules of quantum mechanics. The Dirac equation accommodated the spin-1/2
value of the electron and accounted for its magnetic moment as well as giving accurate
predictions for the spectra of hydrogen. The attempted interpretation of the Dirac equation as a
single-particle equation could not be maintained long, however, and finally it was shown that
several of its undesirable properties (such as negative-energy states) could be made sense of by
reformulating and reinterpreting the Dirac equation as a true field equation, in this case for the
quantized "Dirac field" or the "electron field", with the "negative-energy solutions" pointing to
the existence of anti-particles. This work was performed first by Dirac himself with the invention
of hole theory 1930 and also by Wendell Furry, Robert Oppenheimer, Vladimir Fock, and others.
Schrödinger, during the same period that he discovered his famous equation in 1926, also
independently found the relativistic generalization of it known as the Klein-Gordon equation but
dismissed it since, without spin, it predicted impossible properties for the hydrogen spectrum.
See Oskar Klein, Walter Gordon. All relativistic wave equations that describe spin-zero particles
are said to be of the Klein-Gordon type.

A subtle and careful analysis in 1933 and later in 1950 by Niels Bohr and Leon Rosenfeld
showed that there is a fundamental limitation on the ability to simultaneously measure the
electric and magnetic field strengths that enter into the description of charges in interaction with
radiation, imposed by the uncertainty principle, which must apply to all canonically conjugate
quantities. This limitation is crucial for the successful formulation and interpretation of a
quantum field theory of photons and electrons(quantum electrodynamics),and indeed,any
perturbative quantum field theory. The analysis of Bohr and Rosenfeld explains fluctuations in
the values of the electromagnetic field that differ from the classically "allowed" values distant
from the sources of the field. Their analysis was crucial to showing that the limitations and
physical implications of the uncertainty principle apply to all dynamical systems, whether fields
or material particles. Their analysis also convinced most people that any notion of returning to a
fundamental description of nature based on classical field theory, such as what Einstein aimed at
with his numerous and failed attempts at a classical unified field theory, was simply out of the
question.
The third thread in the development of quantum field theory was the need to handle the statistics
of many-particle systems consistently and with ease. In 1927 Jordan tried to extend the canonical
quantization of fields to the many-body wave functions of identical particles, a procedure that is
sometimes called second quantization. In 1928, Jordan and Eugene Wigner found that the
quantum field describing electrons, or other fermions, had to be expanded using anti-commuting
creation and annihilation operators due to the Pauli exclusion principle. This thread of
development was incorporated into many-body theory and strongly influenced condensed matter
physics and nuclear physics.

Despite its early successes quantum field theory was plagued by several serious theoretical
difficulties. Basic physical quantities, such as the self-energy of the electron, the energy shift of
electron states due to the presence of the electromagnetic field, gave infinite, divergent
contributions — a nonsensical result — when computed using the perturbative techniques
available in the 1930s and most of the 1940s. The electron self-energy problem was already a
serious issue in the classical electromagnetic field theory, where the attempt to attribute to the
electron a finite size or extent (the classical electron-radius) led immediately to the question of
what non-electromagnetic stresses would need to be invoked, which would presumably hold the
electron together against the Coulomb repulsion of its finite-sized "parts". The situation was dire,
and had certain features that reminded many of the "Rayleigh-Jeans difficulty". What made the
situation in the 1940s so desperate and gloomy, however, was the fact that the correct ingredients
(the second-quantized Maxwell-Dirac field equations) for the theoretical description of
interacting photons and electrons were well in place, and no major conceptual change was
needed analogous to that which was necessitated by a finite and physically sensible account of
the radiative behavior of hot objects, as provided by the Planck radiation law.

This "divergence problem" was solved in the case of quantum electrodynamics during the late
1940s and early 1950s by Hans Bethe, Tomonaga, Schwinger, Feynman, and Dyson, through the
procedure known as renormalization. Great progress was made after realizing that ALL infinities
in quantum electrodynamics are related to two effects: the self-energy of the electron/positron
and vacuum polarization. Renormalization concerns the business of paying very careful attention
to just what is meant by, for example, the very concepts "charge" and "mass" as they occur in the
pure, non-interacting field-equations. The "vacuum" is itself polarizable and, hence, populated
by virtual particle (on shell and off shell) pairs, and, hence, is a seething and busy dynamical
system in its own right. This was a critical step in identifying the source of "infinities" and
"divergences". The "bare mass" and the "bare charge" of a particle, the values that appear in the
free-field equations (non-interacting case), are abstractions that are simply not realized in
experiment (in interaction). What we measure, and hence, what we must take account of with our
equations, and what the solutions must account for, are the "renormalized mass" and the
"renormalized charge" of a particle. That is to say, the "shifted" or "dressed" values these
quantities must have when due care is taken to include all deviations from their "bare values" is
dictated by the very nature of quantum fields themselves.

The first approach that bore fruit is known as the "interaction representation," (see the article
Interaction picture) a Lorentz covariant and gauge-invariant generalization of time-dependent
perturbation theory used in ordinary quantum mechanics, and developed by Tomonaga and
Schwinger, generalizing earlier efforts of Dirac, Fock and Podolsky. Tomonaga and Schwinger
invented a relativistically covariant scheme for representing field commutators and field
operators intermediate between the two main representations of a quantum system, the
Schrödinger and the Heisenberg representations (see the article on quantum mechanics). Within
this scheme, field commutators at separated points can be evaluated in terms of "bare" field
creation and annihilation operators. This allows for keeping track of the time-evolution of both
the "bare" and "renormalized", or perturbed, values of the Hamiltonian and expresses everything
in terms of the coupled, gauge invariant "bare" field-equations. Schwinger gave the most elegant
formulation of this approach. The next and most famous development is due to Feynman, who,
with his brilliant rules for assigning a "graph"/"diagram" to the terms in the scattering matrix
(See S-Matrix Feynman diagrams). These directly corresponded (through the Schwinger-Dyson
equation) to the measurable physical processes (cross sections, probability amplitudes, decay
widths and lifetimes of excited states) one needs to be able to calculate. This revolutionized how
quantum field theory calculations are carried-out in practice.

Two classic text-books from the 1960s, J.D. Bjorken and S.D. Drell, Relativistic Quantum
Mechanics (1964) and J.J. Sakurai, Advanced Quantum Mechanics (1967), thoroughly developed
the Feynman graph expansion techniques using physically intuitive and practical methods
following from the correspondence principle, without worrying about the technicalities involved
in deriving the Feynman rules from the superstructure of quantum field theory itself. Although
both Feynman's heuristic and pictorial style of dealing with the infinities, as well as the formal
methods of Tomonaga and Schwinger, worked extremely well, and gave spectacularly accurate
answers, the true analytical nature of the question of "renormalizability", that is, whether ANY
theory formulated as a "quantum field theory" would give finite answers, was not worked-out till
much later, when the urgency of trying to formulate finite theories for the strong and electro-
weak (and gravitational interactions) demanded its solution.

Renormalization in the case of QED was largely fortuitous due to the smallness of the coupling
constant, the fact that the coupling has no dimensions involving mass, the so-called fine structure
constant, and also the zero-mass of the gauge boson involved, the photon, rendered the small-
distance/high-energy behavior of QED manageable. Also, electromagnetic processess are very
"clean" in the sense that they are not badly suppressed/damped and/or hidden by the other gauge
interactions. By 1958 Sidney Drell observed: "Quantum electrodynamics (QED) has achieved a
status of peaceful coexistence with its divergences...."

The unification of the electromagnetic force with the weak force encountered initial difficulties
due to the lack of accelerator energies high enough to reveal processes beyond the Fermi
interaction range. Additionally, a satisfactory theoretical understanding of hadron substructure
had to be developed, culminating in the quark model.

In the case of the strong interactions, progress concerning their short-distance/high-energy

behavior was much slower and more frustrating. For strong interactions with the electro-weak
fields, there were difficult issues regarding the strength of coupling, the mass generation of the
force carriers as well as their non-linear, self interactions. Although there has been theoretical
progress toward a grand unified quantum field theory incorporating the electro-magnetic force,
the weak force and the strong force, empirical verification is still pending. Superunification,
incorporating the gravitational force, is still very speculative, and is under intensive investigation
by many of the best minds in contemporary theoretical physics. Gravitation is a tensor field
description of a spin-2 gauge-boson, the "graviton", and is further discussed in the articles on
general relativity and quantum gravity.

From the point of view of the techniques of (four-dimensional) quantum field theory, and as the
numerous and heroic efforts to formulate a consistent quantum gravity theory by some very able
minds attests, gravitational quantization was, and is still, the reigning champion for bad behavior.
There are problems and frustrations stemming from the fact that the gravitational coupling
constant has dimensions involving inverse powers of mass, and as a simple consequence, it is
plagued by badly behaved (in the sense of perturbation theory) non-linear and violent self-
interactions. Gravity, basically, gravitates, which in turn...gravitates...and so on, (i.e., gravity is
itself a source of gravity,...,) thus creating a nightmare at all orders of perturbation theory. Also,
gravity couples to all energy equally strongly, as per the equivalence principle, so this makes the
notion of ever really "switching-off", "cutting-off" or separating, the gravitational interaction
from other interactions ambiguous and impossible since, with gravitation, we are dealing with
the very structure of space-time itself. (See general covariance and, for a modest, yet highly non-
trivial and significant interplay between (QFT) and gravitation (spacetime), see the article
Hawking radiation and references cited therein. Also quantum field theory in curved spacetime).

Thanks to the somewhat brute-force, clanky and heuristic methods of Feynman, and the elegant
and abstract methods of Tomonaga/Schwinger, from the period of early renormalization, we do
have the modern theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED). It is still the most accurate physical
theory known, the prototype of a successful quantum field theory. Beginning in the 1950s with
the work of Yang and Mills, as well as Ryoyu Utiyama, following the previous lead of Weyl and
Pauli, deep explorations illuminated the types of symmetries and invariances any field theory
must satisfy. QED, and indeed, all field theories, were generalized to a class of quantum field
theories known as gauge theories. Quantum electrodynamics is the most famous example of
what is known as an Abelian gauge theory. It relies on the symmetry group U(1) and has one
massless gauge field, the U(1) gauge symmetry, dictating the form of the interactions involving
the electromagnetic field, with the photon being the gauge boson. That symmetries dictate, limit
and necessitate the form of interaction between particles is the essence of the "gauge theory
revolution." Yang and Mills formulated the first explicit example of a non-Abelian gauge theory,
Yang-Mills theory, with an attempted explanation of the strong interactions in mind. The strong
interactions were then (incorrectly) understood in the mid-1950s, to be mediated by the pi-
mesons, the particles predicted by Hideki Yukawa in 1935, based on his profound reflections
concerning the reciprocal connection between the mass of any force-mediating particle and the
range of the force it mediates. This was allowed by the uncertainty principle. The 1960s and
1970s saw the formulation of a gauge theory now known as the Standard Model of particle
physics, which systematically describes the elementary particles and the interactions between
them.

The electroweak interaction part of the standard model was formulated by Sheldon Glashow in
the years 1958-60 with his discovery of the SU(2)xU(1) group structure of the theory. Steven
Weinberg and Abdus Salam brilliantly invoked the Anderson-Higgs mechanism for the
generation of the W's and Z masses (the intermediate vector boson(s) responsible for the weak
interactions and neutral-currents) and keeping the mass of the photon zero. The Goldstone/Higgs
idea for generating mass in gauge theories was sparked in the late 1950s and early 1960s when a
number of theoreticians (including Yoichiro Nambu, Steven Weinberg, Jeffrey Goldstone,
François Englert, Robert Brout, G. S. Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, Tom Kibble and Philip Warren
Anderson) noticed a possibly useful analogy to the (spontaneous) breaking of the U(1) symmetry
of electromagnetism in the formation of the BCS ground-state of a superconductor. The gauge
boson involved in this situation, the photon, behaves as though it has acquired a finite mass.
There is a further possibility that the physical vacuum (ground-state) does not respect the
symmetries implied by the "unbroken" electroweak Lagrangian (see the article Electroweak
interaction for more details) from which one arrives at the field equations. The electroweak
theory of Weinberg and Salam was shown to be renormalizable (finite) and hence consistent by
Gerardus 't Hooft and Martinus Veltman. The Glashow-Weinberg-Salam theory (GWS-Theory)
is a triumph and, in certain applications, gives an accuracy on a par with quantum
electrodynamics.

Also during the 1970s parallel developments in the study of phase transitions in condensed
matter physics led Leo Kadanoff, Michael Fisher and Kenneth Wilson (extending work of Ernst
Stueckelberg, Andre Peterman, Murray Gell-Mann, and Francis Low) to a set of ideas and
methods known as the renormalization group. By providing a better physical understanding of
the renormalization procedure invented in the 1940s, the renormalization group sparked what has
been called the "grand synthesis" of theoretical physics, uniting the quantum field theoretical
techniques used in particle physics and condensed matter physics into a single theoretical
framework.

The study of quantum field theory is alive and flourishing, as are applications of this method to
many physical problems. It remains one of the most vital areas of theoretical physics today,
providing a common language to many branches of physics.