The renormalization group: Critical phenomena and the Kondo problem

Kenneth G Wilson

This review covers several topics involving renormalization group ideas. The solution of the s-wave Kondo Hamiltonian, describing a single magnetic impurity in a nonmagnetic metal, is explained in detail. See Sees. VII-IX. “Block spin” methods, applied to the two dimensional Ising model, are explained in Sec. VI. The first three sections give a relatively short review of basic renormalization group ideas, mainly in the context of critical phenomena. The relationship of the modern renormalization group to the older problems of divergences in statistical mechanics and field theory and field theoretic renormalization is discussed in Sec. IV. In Sec. V the special case of “marginal variables” is discussed in detail, along with the relationship of the modern renormalization group to its original formulation by Gell-Mann and Low and others.