Lectures on Self-Avoiding Walks

These lecture notes provide a rapid introduction to a number of rigorous results on self-avoiding walks, with emphasis on the critical behaviour. Following an introductory overview of the central problems, an account is given of the Hammersley--Welsh bound on the number of self-avoiding walks and its consequences for the growth rates of bridges and self-avoiding polygons. A detailed proof that the connective constant on the hexagonal lattice equals $\sqrt{2+\sqrt{2}}$ is then provided. The lace expansion for self-avoiding walks is described, and its use in understanding the critical behaviour in dimensions $d>4$ is discussed. Functional integral representations of the self-avoiding walk model are discussed and developed, and their use in a renormalisation group analysis in dimension 4 is sketched. Problems and solutions from tutorials are included.