We consider different methods of calculating the (fractional) fermion number of solitons based on the heat kernel expansion. We derive a formula for the localized eta function a more systematic version of the derivative expansion for spectral assymmetry and that provides a more systematic version of the derivative expansion for spectral asymmetry and compute the fermion number in a multiflavour extension of the Goldstone-Wilczek model.We also propose an improved expansionof the heat kernelthat allows the tackling ofthe convergence issues and permits an automated computation of the coefficients
The heat kernel expansion on even-dimensional hyperbolic spaces is asymptotic at both short and long times, with interestingly different Borel properties for these short and long time expansions. Resummations in terms of incomplete gamma functions pr
ovide accurate extrapolations and analytic continuations, relating the heat kernel to the Schrodinger kernel, and the heat kernel on hyperbolic space to the heat kernel on spheres. For the diagonal heat kernel there is also a duality between short and long times which mixes the scalar and spinor heat kernels.
We consider the problem of the symmetry of the off-diagonal heat-kernel coefficients as well as the coefficients corresponding to the short-distance-divergent part of the Hadamard expansion in general smooth (analytic or not) manifolds. The requireme
nt of such a symmetry played a central r^{o}le in the theory of the point-splitting one-loop renormalization of the stress tensor in either Riemannian or Lorentzian manifolds. Actually, the symmetry of these coefficients has been assumed as a hypothesis in several papers concerning these issues without an explicit proof. The difficulty of a direct proof is related to the fact that the considered off-diagonal heat-kernel expansion, also in the Riemannian case, in principle, may be not a proper asymptotic expansion. On the other hand, direct computations of the off-diagonal heat-kernel coefficients are impossibly difficult in nontrivial cases and thus no case is known in the literature where the symmetry does not hold. By approximating $C^infty$ metrics with analytic metrics in common (totally normal) geodesically convex neighborhoods, it is rigorously proven that, in general $C^infty$ Riemannian manifolds, any point admits a geodesically convex neighborhood where the off-diagonal heat-kernel coefficients, as well as the relevant Hadamards expansion coefficients, are symmetric functions of the two arguments.
During defect-antidefect scattering, bound modes frequently disappear into the continuous spectrum before the defects themselves collide. This leads to a structural, nonperturbative change in the spectrum of small excitations. Sometimes the effect ca
n be seen as a hard wall from which the defect can bounce off. We show the existence of these spectral walls and study their properties in the $phi^4$ model with BPS preserving impurity, where the spectral wall phenomenon can be isolated because the static force between the antikink and the impurity vanishes. We conclude that such spectral walls should surround all solitons possessing internal modes.
Extending our previous construction in the sine-Gordon model, we show how to introduce two kinds of fermionic screening operators, in close analogy with conformal field theory with c<1.
We investigate the effective Dirac equation, corrected by merging two scenarios that are expected to emerge towards the quantum gravity scale. Namely, the existence of a minimal length, implemented by the generalized uncertainty principle, and exotic
spinors, associated with any non-trivial topology equipping the spacetime manifold. We show that the free fermionic dynamical equations, within the context of a minimal length, just allow for trivial solutions, a feature that is not shared by dynamical equations for exotic spinors. In fact, in this coalescing setup, the exoticity is shown to prevent the Dirac operator to be injective, allowing the existence of non-trivial solutions.