Exact Renormalization Group, The - Proceedings Of The Workshop

This text constitutes the proceedings of a workshop on the exact renormalization group, held in Faro, Portugal, in 1998. In particular, the manifestly gauge-invariant formulation of the exact renormalization group equation and the proof of the c-theorem in four dimensions are presented.

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The subject of the exact renormalization group started from pioneering work by Wegner and Houghton in the early seventies and, a decade later, by Polchinski, who formulated the Wilson renormalization group for field theory. In the past decade considerable progress has been made in this field, which includes the development of alternative formulations of the approach and of powerful techniques for solving the exact renormalization group equations, as well as widening of the scope of the exact renormalization group method to include fermions and gauge fields. In particular, two very recent results, namely the manifestly gauge-invariant formulation of the exact renormalization group equation and the proof of the c-theorem in four dimensions, are presented in this volume.