Search results for "hep-th"
showing 10 items of 757 documents
QCD and Strongly Coupled Gauge Theories: Challenges and Perspectives
2014
We dedicate this document to the memory of Mikhail Polikarpov, who passed away in July 2013. Misha worked with us for decades as a convener of the “Confinement” section of the Quark Confinement and Hadron Spectrum Series. He guided and expanded the scientific discussion of that topic, inspiring and under taking new research avenues. From its initial conception, he supported the enterprise of this document and organized Sect. 8, writing the part on confinement himself. He attracted the XIth Conference on Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum to St. Petersburg (September 8-12, 2014; see http://phys.spbu.ru/confxi.html). His warm and kind personality, his high sense of humor, his ideas in …
Electromagnetic Duality Anomaly in Curved Spacetimes
2016
The source-free Maxwell action is invariant under electric-magnetic duality rotations in arbitrary spacetimes. This leads to a conserved classical Noether charge. We show that this conservation law is broken at the quantum level in presence of a background classical gravitational field with a non-trivial Chern-Pontryagin invariant, in a parallel way to the chiral anomaly for massless Dirac fermions. Among the physical consequences, the net polarization of the quantum electromagnetic field is not conserved.
Semiclassical geons at particle accelerators
2014
We point out that in certain four-dimensional extensions of general relativity constructed within the Palatini formalism stable self-gravitating objects with a discrete mass and charge spectrum may exist. The incorporation of nonlinearities in the electromagnetic field may effectively reduce their mass spectrum by many orders of magnitude. As a consequence, these objects could be within (or near) the reach of current particle accelerators. We provide an exactly solvable model to support this idea.
Ricci-Based Gravity theories and their impact on Maxwell and nonlinear electromagnetic models
2019
Abstract We extend the correspondence between metric-affine Ricci-Based Gravity the- ories and General Relativity (GR) to the case in which the matter sector is represented by linear and nonlinear electromagnetic fields. This complements previous studies focused on fluids and scalar fields. We establish the general algorithm that relates the matter fields in the GR and RBG frames and consider some applications. In particular, we find that the so-called Eddington-inspired Born-Infeld gravity theory coupled to Maxwell electromag- netism is in direct correspondence with GR coupled to Born-Infeld electromagnetism. We comment on the potential phenomenological implications of this relation.
Dispersion Interaction between Two Hydrogen Atoms in a Static Electric Field
2019
We consider the dispersion interaction between two ground-state hydrogen atoms, interacting with the quantum electromagnetic field in the vacuum state, in the presence of an external static electric field, both in the nonretarded and in the retarded Casimir-Polder regime. We show that the presence of the external field strongly modifies the dispersion interaction between the atoms, changing its space dependence. Moreover, we find that, for specific geometrical configurations of the two atoms with respect to the external field and/or the relative orientation of the fields acting on the two atoms, it is possible to change the character of the dispersion force, turning it from attractive to re…
Vacuum energy densities of a field in a cavity with a mobile boundary
2015
We consider the zero-point field fluctuations, and the related field energy densities, inside a one-dimensional and a three-dimensional cavity with a mobile wall. The mechanical degrees of freedom of the mobile wall are described quantum mechanically and they are fully included in the overall system dynamics. In this optomechanical system, the field and the wall can interact with each other through the radiation pressure on the wall, given by the photons inside the cavity or even by vacuum fluctuations. We consider two cases: the one-dimensional electromagnetic field and the three-dimensional scalar field, and use the Green's functions formalism, which allows extension of the results obtain…
Reflexions on Mahler: Dessins, Modularity and Gauge Theories
2021
We provide a unified framework of Mahler measure, dessins d'enfants, and gauge theory. With certain physically motivated Newton polynomials from reflexive polygons, the Mahler measure and the dessin are in one-to-one correspondence. From the Mahler measure, one can construct a Hauptmodul for a congruence subgroup of the modular group, which contains the subgroup associated to the dessin. In brane tilings and quiver gauge theories, the modular Mahler flow gives a natural resolution of the inequivalence amongst the three different complex structures $\tau_{R,G,B}$. We also study how, in F-theory, 7-branes and their monodromies arise in the context of dessins. Moreover, we give a dictionary on…
Hierarchies of geometric entanglement
2007
We introduce a class of generalized geometric measures of entanglement. For pure quantum states of $N$ elementary subsystems, they are defined as the distances from the sets of $K$-separable states ($K=2,...,N$). The entire set of generalized geometric measures provides a quantification and hierarchical ordering of the different bipartite and multipartite components of the global geometric entanglement, and allows to discriminate among the different contributions. The extended measures are applied to the study of entanglement in different classes of $N$-qubit pure states. These classes include $W$ and $GHZ$ states, and their symmetric superpositions; symmetric multi-magnon states; cluster s…
Massless positivity in graviton exchange
2021
We formulate Positivity Bounds for scattering amplitudes including exchange of massless particles. We generalize the standard construction through dispersion relations to include the presence of a branch cut along the real axis in the complex plane for the Maldestam variable $s$. In general, validity of these bounds require the cancellation of divergences in the forward limit of the amplitude, proportional to $t^{-1}$ and $\log(t)$. We show that this is possible in the case of gravitons if one assumes a Regge behavior of the amplitude at high energies below the Planck scale, as previously suggested in the literature, and that the concrete UV behaviour of the amplitude is uniquely determined…
From motives to differential equations for loop integrals
2013
In this talk we discuss how ideas from the theory of mixed Hodge structures can be used to find differential equations for Feynman integrals. In particular we discuss the two-loop sunrise graph in two dimensions and show that these methods lead to a differential equation which is simpler than the ones obtained from integration-by-parts.