High Energy Physics Theory

The DBI and special galileon theories exhibit a conformal symmetry at unphysical values of the spacetime dimension. We find the Lagrangian form of this symmetry. The special conformal transformations are non-linearly realized on the fields, even though conformal symmetry is unbroken. Commuting the conformal transformations with the extended shift symmetries, we find new symmetries, which when taken together with the conformal and shift symmetries close into a larger algebra. For DBI this larger algebra is the conformal algebra of the higher dimensional bulk in the brane embedding view of DBI. For the special galileon it is a real form of the special linear algebra. We also find the Weyl transformations corresponding to the conformal symmetries, as well as the necessary improvement terms to make the theories Weyl invariant, to second order in the coupling in the DBI case and to lowest order in the coupling in the special galileon case.

We study non-perturbative effects in supersymmetric U(N) gauge theories in eight dimensions realized by means of D(-1)/D7-brane systems with non-trivial world-volume fluxes turned on. Using an explicit string construction in terms of vertex operators, we derive the action for the open strings ending on the D(-1)-branes and exhibit its BRST structure. The space of vacua for these open strings is shown to be in correspondence with the moduli space of generalized ADHM gauge connections which trigger the non-perturbative corrections in the eight-dimensional theory. These corrections are computed via localization and turn out to depend on the curved background used to localize the integrals on the instanton moduli space, and vanish in flat space. Finally, we show that for specific choices of the background the instanton partition functions reduce to weighted sums of the solid partitions of the integers.

This is a lightly edited version of the talk given on September 30, 2020 to inaugurate the international seminar series {\it All Things EFT}. It reviews some of the early history of effective field theories, and concludes with a discussion of the implications of effective field theory for future discovery.

Inspired by the stringy quintessence F-term problem we highlight a generic contribution to the effective moduli masses that arises due to kinetic mixings between the moduli and the quintessence sector. We then proceed to discuss few supergravity toy models that accommodate such effect, and point out possible shortcomings. Interestingly, in the standard 2-derivative supergravity action there is no term to mediate the supersymmetry breaking from the kinetic quintessence sector to the gaugini and generate Majorana masses. Therefore we also propose a 2-derivative supersymmetric invariant that plays exactly this role.

We show that the one-loop Euler-Heisenberg QED effective Lagrangian in a constant background field acquires a very different non-perturbative trans-series structure at two-loop and higher-loop order in the fine structure constant. Beyond one-loop, virtual particles interact, causing fluctuations about the instantons, whereby the simple poles of the one-loop Borel transform become branch points. We illustrate this in detail at two-loop order using Ritus's seminal result for the renormalized two-loop effective Lagrangian as an exact double-integral representation, and propose a possible new approach to computations at higher loop order. Our methods yield remarkably accurate extrapolations from weak-field to strong-field, and from magnetic to electric background field, at both one-loop and two-loop order, based on surprisingly little perturbative input.

It was shown recently that the static tidal response coefficients, called Love numbers, vanish identically for Kerr black holes in four dimensions. In this work, we confirm this result and extend it to the case of spin-0 and spin-1 perturbations. We compute the static response of Kerr black holes to scalar, electromagnetic, and gravitational fields at all orders in black hole spin. We use the unambiguous and gauge-invariant definition of Love numbers and their spin-0 and spin-1 analogs as Wilson coefficients of the point particle effective field theory. This definition also allows one to clearly distinguish between conservative and dissipative response contributions. We demonstrate that the behavior of Kerr black holes responses to spin-0 and spin-1 fields is very similar to that of the spin-2 perturbations. In particular, static conservative responses vanish identically for spinning black holes. This implies that vanishing Love numbers are a generic property of black holes in four-dimensional general relativity. We also show that the dissipative part of the response does not vanish even for static perturbations due to frame-dragging.

The effective action in quantum general relativity is strongly dependent on the gauge-fixing and parametrization of the quantum metric. As a consequence, in the effective approach to quantum gravity, there is no possibility to introduce the renormalization-group framework in a consistent way. On the other hand, the version of effective action proposed by Vilkovisky and DeWitt does not depend on the gauge-fixing and parametrization off-shell, opening the way to explore the running of the cosmological and Newton constants as well as the coefficients of the higher-derivative terms of the total action. We argue that in the effective framework the one-loop beta functions for the zero-, two- and four-derivative terms can be regarded as exact, that means, free from corrections coming from the higher loops. In this perspective, the running describes the renormalization group flow between the present-day Hubble scale in the IR and the Planck scale in the UV.

We compute the area of a generic d-sphere in a Snyder geometry.

We study the perturbative series associated to bi-local correlators in Jackiw-Teitelboim (JT) gravity, for positive weightλof the matter CFT operators. Starting from the known exact expression, derived by CFT and gauge theoretical methods, we reproduce the Schwarzian semiclassical expansion beyond leading order. The computation is done for arbitrary temperature and finite boundary distances, in the case of disk and trumpet topologies. A formula presenting the perturbative result (forλ?�N/2) at any given order in terms of generalized Apostol-Bernoulli polynomials is also obtained. The limit of zero temperature is then considered, obtaining a compact expression that allows to discuss the asymptotic behaviour of the perturbative series. Finally we highlight the possibility to express the exact result as particular combinations of Mordell integrals.

Supersymmetrizable theories, such as M(em)branes and associated matrix-models related to Yang-Mills theory, possess r-matrices