Summary of Quantum Field Theory

Sagar 17th April, 2014

What is QFT?
1. The following are two important questions that one would want to address (a) What are the essential features of QFT ? (b) What does QFT add to our understanding of the world that is not already present in classical eld theory and quantum mechanics taken separately ? 2. Due to exibility in assumptions amongst theoretical physicists, there is no sharp answer to the rst question. But at its core, QFT can be thought to be built up of the following two assumptions (a) Basic dynamical degrees of freedom are operator functions of space and time. These are called quantum elds and they obey appropriate algebraic relations (commutation or anti-commutation). These algebraic relations encode fundamental physical properties of our system. (b) Interactions of the quantum elds are local. One may use other variables with non-local equations of motion but the underlying fundamental variables are always local.

What is QFT good for?

1. (Free) QFT provides explanation for the following facts of Nature (a) There are dierent, yet indistinguishable, copies of elementary particles found in Nature. QFT explains this as a consequence of the fact that dierent copies of an elementary particle are dierent excitations of the same quantum eld, which is the underlying primary reality. (b) The elementry particles form two classes depending on the statistics they obey. QFT explains this by the celebrated Spin-Statistics Theorem whereby particles with integer spin are bosons and those with half-integer sppins are fermions. In particular, the fermion character of electron underlies the stability of matter and the structure of periodic table.

(c) Every particle has an anti-particle. This fact of Nature actually came before observations as a prediction of QFT (due to Dirac). Since anti-particles are dened as CPT conjugates of particles, the CPT theorem in QFT naturally explains this fact. 2. (Interacting) QFT provides explanation for the following more facts of Nature (a) Particle creation and destruction are ubiquitous in physical processes. Interacting QFTs explain this fact very simply as follows - by construction, interactions involve product of dierent quantum elds at a point and upon expanding these quantum elds into positive frequency (annihilation) and negative frequency (creation) modes, one sees the general prevalence of particle creation and destruction. (b) Interaction between particles occur by exchange of other particles. This is a commonplace observation in QFT.

Deeper properties of QFT

1. In QFT, we can only ask - and generally will only obtain - sensible, nite answers when we ask questions that have direct, operational physical meaning. This is essentially because of the excitation of high-frequency modes, which render expectations of physical quantities divergent upon summing over all modes. Cancellation of divergences calls for aa essential modication in the kind of questions wee can ask from a QFT. 2. Innite number of degrees of freedom which occur in a QFT are connected to the requirement of locality. This is because in a QFT, to construct a local eld (x) at a space-time point x , we need to take a superposition (x) = d4 k (k ) exp(ikx) (2 )4

which includes arbitrarily large momenta. 3. It is dicult to construct interacting relativitstic QFTs. Various consistency requirements lead to a restricted class of such theories. Moreover, the extent of such a class depends sensitively on space-time dimensionality and the spins of the elds involved. 4. Consistent interacting relativitstic QFTs that can be constructed display less symmetries than expected.

Formulation of QFT
1. Field theories describing free spin-0 elds of mass m 1 m2 L0 (x) = (x) (x) (x)2 2 2 2. Field theories describing free spin-1/2 elds of mass L1/2 (x) = (x)(i ) (x) 3. Field theories descibing free spin-1 massless gauge elds 1 L1 (x) = [ A (x) A (x)][ A (x) A (x)] 4 4. In units h = c = 1 , all the quantities can be represented as (mass) where is the mass dimension. Coupling constants with negative are called non-renormalizable. Standard Model of particle physics has only renormalizable interactions. This means that it does not require modication upto arbitrarily high energy scales.

Running Couplings

We consider an arbitrary non-abelian gauge theory coupled to spin-0 and spin-1/2 charged particles. Interactions of interest are L= 1 I I G G + (i D ) + (D D m2 ) 4g 2

I IJK J K I I A A are the eld strengths and D + iAI where GI T A A f IJK are the covariant derivatives with f being the structure constants of the gauge group I and T the representation matrices. We want to calculate the change in the zero-point energy upon imposing a constant magnetic eld. Suppose that the magnetic eld is aligned along a normalized, diagonal generator of the gauge group. If we restrict the sums to modes whose energy is less than a cuto , we get -

E (B ) = E + E = where =

1 1 2 2 2 B B [ln( ) + f inite] 2g 2 (2 ) 2 B

1 1 [T (R0 ) + 2T (R 1 ) 2T (R1 )] + [6T (R 1 ) + 24T (R1 )] 2 2 2 96 96 2

and the terms not displayed are nite as One should note that a nite cuto is required to obtain nite results. But to keep locality intact, we have to take to . This conict is resolved by the Renormalization Program. Its guiding idea is that if our experiments probe energy scales well below , then we cannot be very sensitive to modes of much higher energy than . The central result of the Renormalization Program is that if we re-express bare coupling constants 3

and masses in terms of their physical, renormalized counterparts (chosen so as to t observations), the coecients in the perturbation expansion of any physical quantity approach nite limits, independent of the cuto, as the cuto is taken to . A running coupling is dened to satisfy 1 d = 2 d ln(B ) g (B ) If > 0, the coupling decreases as we include higher frequency modes and such a theory is said to be asymptotically free. Calculating for QCD shows that it is a asymptotically free theory. Since the dierent components of the standard model are all gauge theories, we expect them to be dierent manifestations of an underlying gauge symmetry. Even though at the energies of the Standard Model, the couplings of these components are very dierent, running of couplings gives us a way out and keeps up our hope that there may an underlying unied interaction. Using similar calculational methods, when we calculate the running coupling for electromagnetic and weak interactions and assume that there are no new elds beyond the Standard Model, we see that the three running couplings come very close but do not exactly match. This may be an indication that we need to consider some new elds beyond what are known. One way to extend the Standard Model is by including Supersymmetry. We then need to include contributions from such superelds in the calculation of . Once this is done, we see that the three running couplings do indeed meet, albeit at a very high energy of 1016 1017 GeV . From a phenomenological point of view, such energy scale is desirable because one is then safe from experimental limits on nucleon instability. From a theoretical point of view, such energy scale is fascinating because it establishes a connection between the experimentally-grounded particle physics and the elusive quantum theory of gravity which is believed to live naturally at similar high energies.

Limitations?
1. The application of the ideas of QFT to General Relativity, the classical eld theory describing gravity, has not been very fruitful. The problems faced are of following two kinds (a) the Renormalization Program fails at the level of power counting (b) the vanishing smallness Cosmological Constant i snot explained by QFT. These limitations of QFT might reect the failure of the basic principles or the lack of knowledge of appropriate symmetry principles and degrees of freedom in terms of which the theory of quantum gravity should be formulated. The rocky intellectual history of QFT leaves open both these possiblities with no preference to any one.