The low-momentum structure of the gravitational polarization tensor of an ultrarelativistic plasma of scalar particles with $lambdaphi^4$ interactions is evaluated in a two-loop calculation up to and including order $lambda^{3/2}$. This turns out to require an improved perturbation theory which resums a local thermal mass term as well as nonlocal hard-thermal-loop vertices of scalar and gravitational fields.
Interacting quantum scalar field theories in $dS_Dtimes M_d$ spacetime can be reduced to Euclidean field theories in $M_d$ space in the vicinity of $I_+$ infinity of $dS_D$ spacetime. Using this non-perturbative mapping, we analyze the critical behavior of Euclidean $lambdaphi_4^4$ theory in the symmetric phase and find the asymptotic behavior $beta(lambda)sim lambda$ of the beta function at strong coupling. Scaling violating contributions to the beta function are also estimated in this regime.
We reformulate gauge theories in analogy with the vierbein formalism of general relativity. More specifically, we reformulate gauge theories such that their gauge dynamical degrees of freedom are local fields that transform linearly under the dual representation of the charged matter field. These local fields, which naively have the interpretation of non-local operators similar to Wilson lines, satisfy constraint equations. A set of basis tensor fields are used to solve these constraint equations, and their field theory is constructed. A new local symmetry in terms of the basis tensor fields is used to make this field theory local and maintain a Hamiltonian that is bounded from below. The field theory of the basis tensor fields is what we call the basis tensor gauge theory.
We investigate the propagation of gravitational waves on a black hole background within the low energy effective field theory of gravity, where effects from heavy fields are captured by higher dimensional curvature operators. Depending on the spin of the particles integrated out, the speed of gravitational waves at low energy can be either superluminal or subluminal as compared to the causal structure observed by other species. Interestingly however, gravitational waves are always exactly luminal at the black hole horizon, implying that the horizon is identically defined for all species. We further compute the corrections on quasinormal frequencies caused by the higher dimensional curvature operators and highlight the corrections arising from the low energy effective field.
The canonical quantization of a massive symmetric rank-two tensor in string theory, which contains two Stueckelberg fields, was studied. As a preliminary study, we performed a canonical quantization of the Proca model to describe a massive vector particle that shares common properties with the massive symmetric rank-two tensor model. By performing a canonical analysis of the Lagrangian, which describes the symmetric rank-two tensor, obtained by Siegel and Zwiebach (SZ) from string field theory, we deduced that the Lagrangian possesses only first class constraints that generate local gauge transformation. By explicit calculations, we show that the massive symmetric rank-two tensor theory is gauge invariant only in the critical dimension of open bosonic string theory, i.e., $d=26$. This emphasizes that the origin of local symmetry is the nilpotency of the Becchi-Rouet-Stora-Tyutin (BRST) operator, which is valid only in the critical dimension. For a particular gauge imposed on the Stueckelberg fields, the gauge-invariant Lagrangian of the SZ model reduces to the Fierz-Pauli Lagrangian of a massive spin-two particle. Thus, the Fierz-Pauli Lagrangian is a gauge-fixed version of the gauge-invariant Lagrangian for a massive symmetric rank-two tensor. By noting that the Fierz-Pauli Lagrangian is not suitable for studying massive spin-two particles with small masses, we propose the transverse-traceless (TT) gauge to quantize the SZ model as an alternative gauge condition. In the TT gauge, the two Stueckelberg fields can be decoupled from the symmetric rank-two tensor and integrated trivially. The massive spin-two particle can be described by the SZ model in the TT gauge, where the propagator of the massive spin-two particle has a well-defined massless limit.
We consider $lambdaphi^{4}$ kink and sine-Gordon soliton in the presence of a minimal length uncertainty proportional to the Planck length. The modified Hamiltonian contains an extra term proportional to $p^4$ and the generalized Schrodinger equation is expressed as a forth-order differential equation in quasiposition space. We obtain the modified energy spectrum for the discrete states and compare our results with 1-loop resummed and Hartree approximations for the quantum fluctuations. We finally find some lower bounds for the deformations parameter so that the effects of the minimal length have the dominant role.