Perturbative dynamic renormalization of scalar field theories in statistical physics

Abstract

Renormalization is a powerful technique in statistical physics to extract the large-scale behavior of interacting many-body models. These notes aim to give an introduction to perturbative methods that operate on the level of the stochastic evolution equation for a scalar field (e.g., density), including systems that are driven away from equilibrium and thus lack a free energy. While there is a large number of reviews and lecture notes, many are somewhat scarce on technical details and written in the language of quantum field theory, which can be more confusing than helpful. Here we attempt a minimal and concise yet pedagogical introduction to dynamic renormalization in the language of statistical physics with a strong focus on how to actually perform calculations. We provide a symbolic algebra implementation of the discussed techniques including Jupyter notebooks of two illustrations: the KPZ equation and a neural network model.