No Arabic abstract
The in-out formalism is a systematic and powerful method for finding the effective actions in an electromagnetic field and a curved spacetime provided that the field equation has explicitly known solutions. The effective action becomes complex when pairs of charged particles are produced due to an electric field and curved spacetime. This may lead to a conjecture of one-to-one correspondence between the vacuum polarization (real part) and the vacuum persistence (imaginary part). We illustrate the one-loop effective action in a constant electric field in a Minkowski spacetime and in a uniform electric field in a two-dimensional (anti-) de sitter space.
The Effective One-Body formalism of the gravitational two-body problem in general relativity is reconsidered in the light of recent scattering amplitude calculations. Based on the kinematic relationship between momenta and the effective potential, we consider an energy-dependent effective metric describing the scattering in terms of an Effective One-Body problem for the reduced mass. The identification of the effective metric simplifies considerably in isotropic coordinates when combined with a redefined angular momentum map. While the effective energy-dependent metric as expected is not unique, solutions can be chosen perturbatively in the Post-Minkowskian expansion without the need to introduce non-metric corrections. By a canonical transformation, our condition maps to the one based on the standard angular momentum map. Expanding our metric around the Schwarzschild solution we recover the solution based on additional non-metric contributions.
We review past and present results on the non-local form-factors of the effective action of semiclassical gravity in two and four dimensions computed by means of a covariant expansion of the heat kernel up to the second order in the curvatures. We discuss the importance of these form-factors in the construction of mass-dependent beta functions for the Newtons constant and the other gravitational couplings.
A previously published covariant decomposition of the Levi-Civita tensor has demonstrated the strong mathematical parallel between gravity and $N=2$ Yang-Mills theory. We use this to argue that the an $R^2$ type Lagrangian has a stable vacuum of lower energy than the perturbative vacuum. Using a Lagrangian in this form instead of the more conventional Hilbert-Einstein Lagrangian allows us to use the Clairaut-based formalism published by one of us previously to handle gravitys topological degrees of of freedom. We study the effect on second quantisation and discuss the effects on, and of, the particle spectrum.
In $d$ dimensions, the model for a massless $p$-form in curved space is known to be a reducible gauge theory for $p>1$, and therefore its covariant quantisation cannot be carried out using the standard Faddeev-Popov scheme. However, adding a mass term and also introducing a Stueckelberg reformulation of the resulting $p$-form model, one ends up with an irreducible gauge theory which can be quantised `a la Faddeev and Popov. We derive a compact expression for the massive $p$-form effective action, $Gamma^{(m)}_p$, in terms of the functional determinants of Hodge-de Rham operators. We then show that the effective actions $Gamma^{(m)}_p$ and $Gamma^{(m)}_{d-p-1}$ differ by a topological invariant. This is a generalisation of the known result in the massless case that the effective actions $Gamma_p$ and $Gamma_{d-p-2}$ coincide modulo a topological term. Finally, our analysis is extended to the case of massive super $p$-forms coupled to background ${cal N}=1$ supergravity in four dimensions. Specifically, we study the quantum dynamics of the following massive super $p$-forms: (i) vector multiplet; (ii) tensor multiplet; and (iii) three-form multiplet. It is demonstrated that the effective actions of the massive vector and tensor multiplets coincide. The effective action of the massive three-form is shown to be a sum of those corresponding to two massive scalar multiplets, modulo a topological term.
The investigation of UV divergences is a relevant step in better understanding of a new theory. In this work the one-loop divergences in the free field sector are obtained for the popular Galileons model. The calculations are performed by the generalized Schwinger-DeWitt technique and also by means of Feynman diagrams. The first method can be directly generalized to curved space, but here we deal only with the flat-space limit. We show that the UV completion of the theory includes the $pi Box^4pi$ term. According to our previous analysis in the case of quantum gravity, this means that the theory can be modified to become superrenormalizable, but then its physical spectrum includes two massive ghosts and one massive scalar with positive kinetic energy. The effective approach in this theory can be perfectly successful, exactly as in the higher derivative quantum gravity, and in this case the non-renormalization theorem for Galileons remains valid in the low-energy region.