No Arabic abstract
We analyse four-dimensional gravity in the presence of general curvature squared corrections and show that Ehlers SL(2,R) symmetry, which appears in the reduction of standard gravity to three dimensions, is preserved by the correction terms. The mechanism allowing this is a correction of the SL(2,R) transformation laws which resolves problems with the different scaling behaviour of various terms occurring in the reduction.
Motivated by applications to black hole physics and duality, we study the effect of higher derivative corrections on the dimensional reduction of four-dimensional Einstein, Einstein Liouville and Einstein-Maxwell gravity to one direction, as appropriate for stationary, spherically symmetric solutions. We construct a field redefinition scheme such that the one-dimensional Lagrangian is corrected only by powers of first derivatives of the fields, eliminating spurious modes and providing a suitable starting point for quantization. We show that the Ehlers symmetry, broken by the leading $R^2$ corrections in Einstein-Liouville gravity, can be restored by including contributions of Taub-NUT instantons. Finally, we give a preliminary discussion of the duality between higher-derivative F-term corrections on the vector and hypermultiplet branches in N=2 supergravity in four dimensions.
We develop further an approach to computing energy-energy correlations (EEC) directly from finite correlation functions. In this way, one completely avoids infrared divergences. In maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory ($mathcal{N}=4$ sYM), we derive a new, extremely simple formula relating the EEC to a triple discontinuity of a four-point correlation function. We use this formula to compute the EEC in $mathcal{N}=4$ sYM at next-to-next-to-leading order in perturbation theory. Our result is given by a two-fold integral representation that is straightforwardly evaluated numerically. We find that some of the integration kernels are equivalent to those appearing in sunrise Feynman integrals, which evaluate to elliptic functions. Finally, we use the new formula to provide the expansion of the EEC in the back-to-back and collinear limits.
We present a formalism to determine the imaginary part of a general chiral model in the derivative expansion. Our formalism is based on the worldline path integral for the covariant current that can be given in an explicit chiral and gauge covariant form. The effective action is then obtained by integrating the covariant current, taking account of the anomaly.
There is an ongoing quest to improve on the spectroscopic quality of nuclear energy density functionals (EDFs) of the Skyrme type through extensions of its traditional form. One direction for such activities is the inclusion of terms of higher order in gradients in the EDF. We report on exploratory symmetry-breaking calculations performed for an extension of the Skyrme EDF that includes central terms with four gradients at next-to-next-to-leading order (N2LO) and for which the high-quality parametrization SN2LO1 has been constructed recently [P. Becker et al, Phys. Rev. C 96, 044330 (2017)]. Up to now, the investigation of such functionals with higher-order terms was limited to infinite matter and spherically symmetric configurations of singly- and doubly-magic nuclei. We address here nuclei and phenomena that require us to consider axial and non-axial deformation, both for reflection-symmetric and also reflection-asymmetric shapes, as well as the breaking of time-reversal invariance. Achieving these calculations demanded a number of formal developments. These all resulted from the formulation of the N2LO EDF requiring the introduction of new local densities with additional gradients that are not present in the EDF at NLO. Their choice is not unique, but can differ in the way the gradients are coupled. While designing a numerical implementation of N2LO EDFs in Cartesian 3d coordinate-space representation, we have developed a novel definition and a new unifying notation for normal and pair densities that contain gradients at arbitrary order. The resulting scheme resolves several issues with some of the choices that have been made for local densities in the past, in particular when breaking time-reversal symmetry. Guided by general practical considerations, we propose an alternative form of the N2LO contribution to the Skyrme EDF that is built from a different set of densities.
We determine an approximate expression for the O(alpha_s^3) contribution chi_2 to the kernel of the BFKL equation, which includes all collinear and anticollinear singular contributions. This is derived using recent results on the relation between the GLAP and BFKL kernels (including running-coupling effects to all orders) and on small-x factorization schemes. We present the result in various schemes, relevant both for applications to the BFKL equation and to small-x evolution of parton distributions.