Introduction to Renormalization Group Methods in Physics

Bringing together several fields of research which have used the renormalization group method, this book acts as an introduction to more specialized monographs. Starting with fractals, the concepts of self-similarity, scaling and homogeneous functions are introduced. The latter half of the book is devoted to the application of RG methods to critical phenomena, beginning with the purely geometric problem of percolation and then moving on to the model. There are also chapters devoted to mean-field theory and the n-vector model, which lays the ground work for the sigma-expansion and 1/n expansions.