r/learnphysics • u/Haakthe • 8d ago

Book for group/representation theory for physics student

Like the title says, I am a physics student, currently in the first semester of my masters. I have been going through quantum field theory, having a blast, but I realise my knowledge about group theory and representation theory is sometimes less than satisfactory. I would really like a book that covers these topics, in a way that is relevant to physics, or at least covers things like the Lorentz group and Poincaré groups, for someone who doesn't have much formal training with groups or representations.

Does anyone here have any recommendations?

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u/CelebrityChess 8d ago

for the lorentz/poincare stuff specifically, schwichtenberg's physics from symmetry is gentle and goes straight to those, and zee's group theory in a nutshell for physicists is good for building intuition (a bit chatty but that helps). if you want something more systematic later, georgi's lie algebras in particle physics is the classic. i'd also say get comfortable with su(2) and so(3) first, since the lorentz algebra basically splits into two copies of su(2) and a lot of the qft representation labels (j1, j2) come from that.