Stephen Lewis writes: > I've been having a difficult time understanding the material from the book > you provided. I can't find if the same material appears in > Peskin-Schroder either. Can you tell me where a reference to these > materials could be found? ----------------------------------------------------- Predrag: yes, it is confusing. In principle, every book both on quantum mechanics and and quantum field theory does this, which exposition you like best is matter of taste. Peskin-Schroder do it Sect 9.5 "Functional Quantization of Spinor Fields". Mine is slightly idiosyncratic, idea being that if you see what this is about from several very different perspectives, you will understand it better. The objective of Fermions chapter is to teach you (in order of decreasing urgency) 1) in Feynman diagram expensions, every Fermion loop carries a minus sign 2) in effective action, the (logarithmic term) fermionic loops cary a minus sign each - a fancier way of saying 1) above 3) wherever a bosonic Gaussian generates a det(...), fermions produce 1/det(...). This is very important in condensed matter application, for example 4) a fermionic path integration is like bosonic integration, modulo "some" signs. I my notes I also make an effort to make digrams and signs consistent, and excepting one typo I think I did it right - but if you understand and remember 1) and 3) that is what you need to take with you. Now "understanding" is a high order. Here is how I think about it: every time you forbid something, you decrease the number of allowed ways of acting. Pauli exclusion forbids something, and in this case calculation shows you that you subtract fermion loops, rather than adding them. To illustrate this I gave you a simple supersymmetry probelm, where 1 is written in a complicated fashion, as a difference between boson loops and grassmann loops. I call this "negative dimensions"