No Arabic abstract
We present two different aspects of the anomalies in quantum field theory. One is the dispersion relation aspect, the other is differential geometry where we derive the Stora--Zumino chain of descent equations.
We describe the Hamilton geometry of the phase space of particles whose motion is characterised by general dispersion relations. In this framework spacetime and momentum space are naturally curved and intertwined, allowing for a simultaneous description of both spacetime curvature and non-trivial momentum space geometry. We consider as explicit examples two models for Planck-scale modified dispersion relations, inspired from the $q$-de Sitter and $kappa$-Poincare quantum groups. In the first case we find the expressions for the momentum and position dependent curvature of spacetime and momentum space, while for the second case the manifold is flat and only the momentum space possesses a nonzero, momentum dependent curvature. In contrast, for a dispersion relation that is induced by a spacetime metric, as in General Relativity, the Hamilton geometry yields a flat momentum space and the usual curved spacetime geometry with only position dependent geometric objects.
Quantum gravity phenomenology suggests an effective modification of the general relativistic dispersion relation of freely falling point particles caused by an underlying theory of quantum gravity. Here we analyse the consequences of modifications of the general relativistic dispersion on the geometry of spacetime in the language of Hamilton geometry. The dispersion relation is interpreted as the Hamiltonian which determines the motion of point particles. It is a function on the cotangent bundle of spacetime, i.e. on phase space, and determines the geometry of phase space completely, in a similar way as the metric determines the geometry of spacetime in general relativity. After a review of the general Hamilton geometry of phase space we discuss two examples. The phase space geometry of the metric Hamiltonian $H_g(x,p)=g^{ab}(x)p_ap_b$ and the phase space geometry of the first order q-de Sitter dispersion relation of the form $H_{qDS}(x,p)=g^{ab}(x)p_ap_b + ell G^{abc}(x)p_ap_bp_c$ which is suggested from quantum gravity phenomenology. We will see that for the metric Hamiltonian $H_g$ the geometry of phase space is equivalent to the standard metric spacetime geometry from general relativity. For the q-de Sitter Hamiltonian $H_{qDS}$ the Hamilton equations of motion for point particles do not become autoparallels but contain a force term, the momentum space part of phase space is curved and the curvature of spacetime becomes momentum dependent.
If the Standard Model is understood as the first term of an effective field theory, the anomaly-cancellation conditions have to be worked out and fulfilled order by order in the effective field-theory expansion. We bring attention to this issue and study in detail a subset of the anomalies of the effective field theories at the electroweak scale. The end result is a set of sum rules for the operator coefficients. These conditions, which are necessary for the internal consistency of the theory, lead to a number of phenomenological consequences when implemented in analyses of experimental data. In particular, they not only decrease the number of free parameters in different physical processes but have the potential to relate processes with different flavor content. Conversely, a violation of these conditions would necessarily imply the existence of undetected non-decoupling new physics associated with the electroweak energy scale.
These are lecture notes for the course Poisson geometry and deformation quantization given by the author during the fall semester 2020 at the University of Zurich. The first chapter is an introduction to differential geometry, where we cover manifolds, tensor fields, integration on manifolds, Stokes theorem, de Rhams theorem and Frobenius theorem. The second chapter covers the most important notions of symplectic geometry such as Lagrangian submanifolds, Weinsteins tubular neighborhood theorem, Hamiltonian mechanics, moment maps and symplectic reduction. The third chapter gives an introduction to Poisson geometry where we also cover Courant structures, Dirac structures, the local splitting theorem, symplectic foliations and Poisson maps. The fourth chapter is about deformation quantization where we cover the Moyal product, $L_infty$-algebras, Kontsevichs formality theorem, Kontsevichs star product construction through graphs, the globalization approach to Kontsevichs star product and the operadic approach to formality. The fifth chapter is about the quantum field theoretic approach to Kontsevichs deformation quantization where we cover functional integral methods, the Moyal product as a path integral quantization, the Faddeev-Popov and BRST method for gauge theories, infinite-dimensional extensions, the Poisson sigma model, the construction of Kontsevichs star product through a perturbative expansion of the functional integral quantization for the Poisson sigma model for affine Poisson structures and the general construction.
This paper presents two methods to compute scale anomaly coefficients in conformal field theories (CFTs), such as the c anomaly in four dimensions, in terms of the CFT data. We first use Euclidean position space to show that the anomaly coefficient of a four-point function can be computed in the form of an operator product expansion (OPE), namely a weighted sum of OPE coefficients squared. We compute the weights for scale anomalies associated with scalar operators and show that they are not positive. We then derive a different sum rule of the same form in Minkowski momentum space where the weights are positive. The positivity arises because the scale anomaly is the coefficient of a logarithm in the momentum space four-point function. This logarithm also determines the dispersive part, which is a positive sum over states by the optical theorem. The momentum space sum rule may be invalidated by UV and/or IR divergences, and we discuss the conditions under which these singularities are absent. We present a detailed discussion of the formalism required to compute the weights directly in Minkowski momentum space. A number of explicit checks are performed, including a complete example in an 8-dimensional free field theory.