Scholarpedia:Invitation to Quantum Field Theory
Dear %NAME%,
As an editor of Scholarpedia, the open-access on-line peer-reviewed encyclopedia of the scholars' community, I have the great honor and pleasure of inviting you to write the encyclopedic article "%TITLE%" for Scholarpedia. (The ideal size of a single encyclopedic entry is around 3000 words, see below.)
The main goal of Scholarpedia is to become a high-quality encyclopedic reference for the whole scholars' community. Scholarpedia is ---and will be--- free for authors and readers: to survive, we need the help of the most prestigious researchers in all fields.
In the following you will find more detailed informations on Scholarpedia: its unique features, its high quality standards and its authoritative authors, including many Nobel-prize-winner and eponymous authors.
I can imagine that your schedule is very charged, but if you are interested in pursuing this project do not worry: in Scholarpedia we are not obsessed by deadlines, just by articles/authors' quality. If you accept the invitation you will be asked to fix a self-imposed deadline (up to t+6 months). You will anyway be able to modify as many times as necessary to complete your article.
Please notify us your decision as soon as possible by proceeding as follows: to formally accept this invitation, please follow the link %URL%; to decline the invitation, follow instead the link: %URL%&no=1.
If you like the idea, we can invite co-authours (main collaborators or younger researchers) you trust to help you in the task.
If you are interested in Scholarpedia but you prefer to contribute with a different entry, or you have any kind of question/problem, do not hesitate contacting me.
I truly hope you that your schedule will allow you to accept this invitation, and to help us in developing Scholarpedia but ---in any case--- thanks for your attention, your time and your answer.
Looking forward to hearing from you, My best and respectful regards
Riccardo Guida
Editor of Scholarpedia's "Encyclopedia of quantum and statistical field theory" Institut de Physique Théorique, CEA, IPhT, F-91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France CNRS, URA 2306, F-91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France URL (IPhT): http://ipht.cea.fr/en/ URL (Homepage):http://ipht.cea.fr/en/Phocea/Pisp/visu.php?id=38 FAX (IPhT): +33169088120 TEL (IPhT): +33169088110 email: riccardo . guida @ cea . fr
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A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO SCHOLARPEDIA
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======== About Scholarpedia ===============================================
Scholarpedia is a fully open access encyclopedia, meaning that (1) no fee or subscription is required to access its content; (2) no publication charge is imposed to authors. Articles in Scholarpedia are written in a volunteer basis, meaning that no author is payed for his work. Scholarpedia is maintained by the community of scholars, mainly on a volunteer basis. All kind of legal economical support is welcome to let Scholarpedia survive [2].
All articles in Scholarpedia are written by universally acknowledged experts; many articles are written by truly living legends and are frequently eponymous (i.e. carry the name of the author). For an updated list of all Nobel Laureates, Fields Medalists and eponymous authors in Scholarpedia, see http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Scholarpedia:Authors.
Scholarpedia has no connection to Wikipedia, apart the fact that we use the same free software supporting the wikitext markup language: mediawiki ( http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki ). That is why sometimes we make external links to some help pages in Wikipedia.
========== Curatorship and modifications ====================================
Scholarpedia does not publish "research" or "position" papers, but rather "living reviews" on established topics. In Scholarpedia identified users can edit articles, even after they have been peer-reviewed and published. We believe that this process is useful, because, say, other scholars may find and correct an error in an article, add a figure, rewrite a paragraph that is not clearly written, suggest new developements of the field and so on. Nevertheless, a peculiar feature of Scholarpedia is the fact that each article has a "curator" and that suggested modifications of an article are not showed publicly without curator's approval. The curator will give a note in [-10...10] to the modifier [this varies the scholar index of modifiers]. Other protections against vandals and not competent people are under study. All modifications to the article are saved and numbered [the modifier being registered] so that everybody can see say the differences among the first submitted version, the versions after approval and the version after 10 years. The name of the curator appears in the article page.
By default the fist curator of an article is one (or more) of its authors, who are free to resign from this charge in any moment (moreover they can suggest a new curator they trust). All versions of Scholarpedia articles are archived and available for reading and comparison.
The 13th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica has a "Space-Time" entry written by A. Einstein and a "Psychoanalysis" entry written by S. Freud. If Britannica had had the feature of curatorship, physicists and psychologists of today would be fighting each other for the honor of being curators of these articles. The ideal goal of Scholarpedia is to invite today's Einsteins and Freuds to write entries on their major discoveries so that future generation of experts will maintain these articles via the process of curatorship. This way, Scholarpedia will provide a perpetually up-to-date high-quality reference for the scholars' community, like no other peer-reviewed journal or encyclopedia.
==================== Author's elections =============================================
In Scholarpedia authors are either invited by editors or publicly elected by the community of scholars. Public election of authors ensures fairness in assigning articles to the most appropriate expert in each field, expecially for topics which do not have clear "original inventors or discoverers". [3]
About the Encyclopedia of quantum and statistical field theory
Concerning the "Encyclopedia of quantum and statistical field theory" ---the young project started in May 2008 of which I'm responsible--- I list below some of the entries for which we found an authoritative author:
* Stability of matter by E. Lieb * Arnowitt-Deser-Misner formalism by Stanley Deser * Arnowitt-Deser-Misner energy by Stanley Deser * Bekenstein bound by Jacob D. Bekenstein * Bekenstein-Hawking entropy by Jacob D. Bekenstein * Kerr metric by Roy P. Kerr * Kerr-Schild metric by Roy P. Kerr * Newman-Penrose formalism by Ezra (Ted) Newman * Bethe-Salpeter equation (origins) by Edwin E. Salpeter * Appelquist-Carazzone decoupling by Thomas Appelquist * Axial anomaly by Roman W. Jackiw * Becchi-Rouet-Stora-Tyutin symmetry by Carlo M. Becchi * Coleman-Weinberg mechanism by Erick J.Weinberg * Gauge theories by Gerard 't Hooft * Hopf algebra and quantum fields by Dirk Kreimer * Nambu-Goldstone boson by Yoichiro Nambu * Slavnov-Taylor identities by Andrei A. Slavnov * Zinn-Justin equation by Jean Zinn-Justin * Osterwalder-Schrader axioms by Konrad Osterwalder * PCT theorem by Raymond F. Streater * Spin and statistics by Raymond F. Streater * Wightman axioms by Raymond F. Streater * Unruh effect by William G. Unruh * Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory by Vinay Ambegaokar and Leon Cooper * Kondo effect by Jun Kondo * Mermin-Wagner-Hohenberg-Coleman theorem by N. David Mermin * Conformal field theories in two dimensions by Alexander Zamolodchikov * Cappelli-Itzykson-Zuber A-D-E Classification by Andrea Cappelli and Jean-Bernard Zuber * Glashow-Iliopoulos-Maiani mechanism by Jean Iliopoulos * Dokshitzer-Gribov-Lipatov-Altarelli-Parisi equation by Guido Altarelli * Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein effect by Alexei Smirnov * Coleman-Mandula theorem by Jeffrey E. Mandula * Konishi anomaly by Kenichi Konishi * Ashtekar variables by Abhay Ashtekar * Loop Quantum Gravity by Carlo Rovelli * Quantum gravity by Carlo Rovelli * Veneziano amplitude by Gabriele Veneziano
Some entries above are strictly not pertaining to quantum and statistical field theory: they are temporarily hosted by my encyclopedia, which is a germ for a wider one.
For more updated informations see http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Encyclopedia_of_quantum_and_statistical_field_theory.
========= The ideal article in Scholarpedia =======================
The ideal article of Scholarpedia fulfills two challanging requirements: (1) it is written in clear concise and pedagogical style, as appropriate at least for graduate students; (2) it satisfies Einstein's razor "make it as simple as possible, but no simpler".
Encyclopedia of quantum and statistical field theory does not yet have finished articles (the project started in May 2008), but if you are curious you are strongly advised to have a look at articles in other topics, e.g. http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Attractor http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Smale_horseshoe http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Szemer%C3%A9di%27s_Theorem http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Cosmic_X-ray_sources http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Cosmic_background_explorer http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Laser http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Special:Popularpages
========= The size/structure of articles ===================================
Concerning the format of contributions they are quantized in terms of a web-page. A web-page is ideally sized 2500 words (and in any case less than 4000 words and 50 KBytes all figure included). It is up to your taste to decide among the following possibilities: A) write a single web page, B) split each contribution in a set of self consistent subtopics
examples of A) http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Hamiltonian_systems http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Attractor http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Cosmic_background_explorer
examples of B) Dr Kznetsov wrote many interlinked topics. http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/User:KuznetsovYua
==================== Your article ===================================================
If you accept our invitation, your article will be peer-reviewed and freely available online after his completation. After its approval, the article will be archived in Scholarpedia's free online journal (ISSN 1941-6016 by the Library of Congress, USA) [4] and it will be cited like eg "Izhikevich E. M. (2006) Bursting. Scholarpedia, 1(3):1300". or more precisely "Izhikevich E. M. (2006) Bursting. Scholarpedia, 1(3):1300, revision 1401"
As an author you will have the freedom to select the copyright policy for your article from the choices: (1) author owns the copyright and licenses the content to Scholarpedia, (2) Creative Commons, (3) GNU FDL.
In addition to being the author of the article, you will become its curator. Curatorship task typically takes less than one hour per year; in any case do not worry about that, curator is free to resign at any moment (and to choose a successor he trusts).
=============== Your Account ========================================================
The following account was created for you in Scholarpedia: Username: %USERNAME% Password: %PASSWORD%
================ Co-authors ============================================================
You can have as many co-authors and co-curators as you wish. Instructions for inviting authors/co-authors can be found at http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Scholarpedia:Register. Consider inviting your collaborators as co-authors and taking former students or a post-docs as co-curators, to take care of the article on the long run.
================ Suggestions and self-candidature for other entries ======================
Suggestions for other topics which another expert (or maybe you) could write, are in any case welcome, expecially if you feel that your article is not fully self-consistent and needs some other correlated articles to be understandable. Before sending a suggestion for an author, be sure that your candidate is a universally-acknowledged authority of the field. To submit suggestions, please follow instructions at http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Scholarpedia:Suggest_authors.
================= Wikitext =====================================================================
IMPORTANT REMARK: If you feel you cannot deal with wikitext consider having a young co-author to help you in this task; in any case do not give up for this reason and communicate me your concerns.
Articles in Scholarpedia are presently written in Wikitext markup language. Wikitext is inteded to be simpler than LaTeX2e and anyway allows for writing equations in LaTeX2e (with AMS-LaTeX package). An average Latex user can learn how to write an article in few hours.
Examples:
Title
corresponds to \section{Title}Title
corresponds to \subsection{Title}bla bla corresponds to \textit{bla bla} bla bla corresponds to \textbf{bla bla} bla bla corresponds to \textbf{\textit{bla bla}}
example of solution shows "example of solution" and creates an interna link to the article "Kerr-Newman metric" The link is red if the article does not exists (or you made some misprint), blue if it exists, green if it is under author's election.
Kerr-Newman metric is equivalent to Kerr-Newman metric; if the article "Kerr-Newman metric" exists the internal link is automatically created without need of writing ....
Scholarpedia web site shows "Scholarpedia web site" and creates a external link to that URL.
\( ... \) corresponds to $ ... $ or $$ ... $$. Example\[ x^3+ \frac{1}{3} y''\neq 0 \Leftrightarrow \int_{\partial\Omega} \!\mathbf{d}w = \begin{vmatrix}x & y \\ z & v \end{vmatrix} \]
GETTING STARTED: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Cheatsheet-en.pdf http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Help:Math http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Formula
More complete informations can be found here: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Help:Contents http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Scholarpedia:Instructions_for_authors
WIKI EDITORS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_editor_support
============== More informations =======================================================
More detailed instructions are available at http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Scholarpedia:Instructions_for_Authors http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Help:Contents
