TY - JOUR A1 - del Razo, Mauricio A1 - Lamma, Tommaso A1 - Merbis, Wout T1 - Field theories and quantum methods for stochastic reaction-diffusion systems JF - Rev. Mod. Phys. N2 - Complex systems are composed of many particles or agents that move and interact with one another. In most real-world applications, these systems involve a varying number of particles/agents that change due to interactions with the environment or their internal dynamics. The underlying mathematical framework to model these systems must incorporate the spatial transport of particles/agents and their interactions, as well as changes to their copy numbers, all of which can be formulated in terms of stochastic reaction-diffusion processes. However, the standard probabilistic representation of these processes can be overly complex because of the combinatorial aspects arising due to the non-linear interactions and varying particle numbers. In this manuscript, we review the main field theory representations of stochastic reaction-diffusion systems, which handle these issues "under–the–hood’’. First, we focus on bringing techniques familiar to theoretical physicists —such as second quantization, Fock space, path integrals and quantum field theory— back into the classical domain of reaction-diffusion systems. We demonstrate how various field theory representations, which have evolved historically, can all be unified under a single basis-independent representation. We then extend existing quantum-based methods and notation to work directly on the level of the unifying representation, and we illustrate how they can be used to consistently obtain previous known results in a more straightforward manner, such as numerical discretizations and relations between model parameters at multiple scales. Throughout the work, we contextualize how these representations mirror well-known models of chemical physics depending on their spatial resolution, as well as the corresponding macroscopic (large copy number) limits. The framework presented here may find applications in a diverse set of scientific fields, including physical chemistry, theoretical ecology, epidemiology, game theory and socio-economical models of complex systems, specifically in the modeling and multi-scale simulation of complex systems with varying numbers of particles/agents. The presentation is done in a self-contained educational and unifying manner such that it can be followed by researchers across several fields. Y1 - 2026 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1103/9qlw-gyd7 VL - 98 ER -