Recommend a many-body physics book?

[Lou Pecora]

I have recently begun research in tunneling in quantum dots. It's a new
area for me (I am coming from nonlinear dynamics and chaos research) and
I can see that I have a lot to learn on the side of many-body physics,
especially in solid state systems (not so much in high energy, I
suspect) along with other things like scattering theory for open
systems, etc.

Can anyone recommend a good book on these subjects that will get me
going? I am looking around, but there are a lot and they range from
very theoretical to solid state applications for those who already know
second quantization stuff (not me), etc. I need to be introduced to the
subject, but still come away with something I can apply to my research.
Graduate school was 35 years ago although I have a pretty strong
mathematical foundation.

Thanks for any suggestions.

--
-- Lou Pecora

[Arnold Neumaier]

Lou Pecora wrote:
> I have recently begun research in tunneling in quantum dots. It's a new
> area for me (I am coming from nonlinear dynamics and chaos research) and
> I can see that I have a lot to learn on the side of many-body physics,
> especially in solid state systems (not so much in high energy, I
> suspect) along with other things like scattering theory for open
> systems, etc.

For open systems, I can recommend, from very different perspectives,

H Grabert,
Projection Operator Techniques in Nonequilibrium
Statistical Mechanics,
Springer Tracts in Modern Physics, 1982

Hans C. Oettinger
Beyond Equilibrium Thermodynamics
Wiley 2005

Arnold Neumaier

[Igor Khavkine]

The trio of classics are

Mahan, _Many-Particle Physics_
Fetter & Walecka, _Quantum Theory of Many Particle Systems_
Abrikosov et al., _Methods of QFT in Statistical Physics_

I would recommend Mahan for a very lucent introduction to second
quantization. Quantum dots are a subject rather more recent than these
books, but with a solid foundation in the basics, you can move on to
more advanced monographs.

Also, a fairly comprehensive treatment of open quantum systems can be
found in

Breuer & Petruccione, _The Theory of Open Quantum Systems_

Hope this helps.

Igor