Worldline formalism for a confined scalar field
The worldline formalism is a useful scheme in quantum field theory which has also become a powerful tool for numerical computations. The key ingredient in this formalism is the first quantization of an auxiliary point-particle whose transition amplitudes correspond to the heat-kernel of the operator...
Guardado en:
| Autores principales: | , , , , |
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| Formato: | Articulo |
| Lenguaje: | Inglés |
| Publicado: |
2019
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| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | http://sedici.unlp.edu.ar/handle/10915/123514 |
| Aporte de: |
| Sumario: | The worldline formalism is a useful scheme in quantum field theory which has also become a powerful tool for numerical computations. The key ingredient in this formalism is the first quantization of an auxiliary point-particle whose transition amplitudes correspond to the heat-kernel of the operator of quantum fluctuations of the field theory. However, to study a quantum field which is confined within some boundaries one needs to restrict the path integration domain of the auxiliary point-particle to a specific subset of worldlines enclosed by those boundaries. We show how to implement this restriction for the case of a scalar field confined to the D-dimensional ball under Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions, and compute the first few heat-kernel coefficients as a verification of our construction. We argue that this approach could admit different generalizations. |
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