High Energy Physics Theory

We investigate the asymptotic symmetry group of a scalar field minimally-coupled to an abelian gauge field using the Hamiltonian formulation. This extends previous work by Henneaux and Troessaert on the pure electromagnetic case. We deal with minimally coupled massive and massless scalar fields and find that they behave differently insofar as the latter do not allow for canonically implemented asymptotic boost symmetries. We also consider the abelian Higgs model and show that its asymptotic canonical symmetries reduce to the Poincaré group in an unproblematic fashion.

The quantum gravity path integral involves a sum over topologies that invites comparisons to worldsheet string theory and to Feynman diagrams of quantum field theory. However, the latter are naturally associated with the non-abelian algebra of quantum fields, while the former has been argued to define an abelian algebra of superselected observables associated with partition-function-like quantities at an asymptotic boundary. We resolve this apparent tension by pointing out a variety of discrete choices that must be made in constructing a Hilbert space from such path integrals, and arguing that the natural choices for quantum gravity differ from those used to construct QFTs. We focus on one-dimensional models of quantum gravity in order to make direct comparisons with worldline QFT.

We show that in a spontaneously broken effective gauge field theory, quantized in a general backgroundRξ-gauge, also the background fields undergo a non-linear (albeit background-gauge invariant) field redefinition induced by radiative corrections. This redefinition proves to be crucial in order to renormalize the coupling constants of gauge-invariant operators in a gauge-independent way. The classical background-quantum splitting is also in general non-linearly deformed (in a non gauge-invariant way) by radiative corrections. Remarkably, such deformations vanish in the Landau gauge, to all orders in the loop expansion.

Bending of light rays by gravitational sources is one of the first evidences of the general relativity. When the gravitational souce is a stationary massive object such as a black hole, the bending angle has an integral representation, from which various series expansions in terms of the parameters of orbit and the background spacetime has been derived. However, it is not clear that it has any analytic expansion. In this paper, we show that such an analytic expansion can be obtained for the case of a Schwarzschild black hole by solving an inhomogeneous Picard-Fuchs equation, which has been applied to compute effective superpotentials on D-branes in the Calabi-Yau manifolds. From the analytic expression of the bending angle, both weak and strong deflection expansions are explicitly obtained. We show that the result can be obtained by the direct integration approach. We also discuss how the charge of the gravitational source affects the bending angle and show that a similar analytic expression can be obtained for the extremal Reissner-Nordstroem spacetime.

As an extended companion paper to [1], we elaborate in detail how the tensor network construction of a p-adic CFT encodes geometric information of a dual geometry even as we deform the CFT away from the fixed point by finding a way to assign distances to the tensor network. In fact we demonstrate that a unique (up to normalizations) emergent graph Einstein equation is satisfied by the geometric data encoded in the tensor network, and the graph Einstein tensor automatically recovers the known proposal in the mathematics literature, at least perturbatively order by order in the deformation away from the pure Bruhat-Tits Tree geometry dual to pure CFTs. Once the dust settles, it becomes apparent that the assigned distance indeed corresponds to some Fisher metric between quantum states encoding expectation values of bulk fields in one higher dimension. This is perhaps a first quantitative demonstration that a concrete Einstein equation can be extracted directly from the tensor network, albeit in the simplified setting of the p-adic AdS/CFT.

In this sequel to [1], we take up a second approach in bending the Bruhat-Tits tree. Inspired by the BTZ black hole connection, we demonstrate that one can transplant it to the Bruhat-Tits tree, at the cost of defining a novel "exponential function" on the p-adic numbers that is hinted by the BT tree.We demonstrate that the PGL(2,Qp)Wilson lines [2] evaluated on this analogue BTZ connection is indeed consistent with correlation functions of a CFT at finite temperatures. We demonstrate that these results match up with the tensor network reconstruction of the p-adic AdS/CFT with a different cutoff surface at the asymptotic boundary, and give explicit coordinate transformations that relate the analogue p-adic BTZ background and the "pure" Bruhat-Tits tree background. This is an interesting demonstration that despite the purported lack of descendents in p-adic CFTs, there exists non-trivial local Weyl transformations in the CFT corresponding to diffeomorphism in the Bruhat-Tits tree.

Opportunity to generate beyond Horndeski interactions is addressed. An amplitude generating a certain beyond Horndeski coupling is explicitly found. The amplitude is free from ultraviolet divergences, so it is protected from ultraviolet contributions and can be considered as a universal prediction of effective field theory.

Multi-centered bubbling solutions are black hole microstate geometries that arise as smooth solutions of 5-dimensionalN=2Supergravity. When these solutions reach the scaling limit, their resulting geometries develop an infinitely deep throat and look arbitrarily close to a black hole geometry. We depict a connection between the scaling limit in the moduli space of Microstate Geometries and the Swampland Distance Conjecture. The naive extension of the Distance Conjecture implies that the distance in moduli space between a reference point and a point approaching the scaling limit is set by the proper length of the throat as it approaches the scaling limit. Independently, we also compute a distance in the moduli space of 3-centre solutions, from the Kähler structure of its phase space using quiver quantum mechanics. We show that the two computations of the distance in moduli space do not agree and comment on the physical implications of this mismatch.

We study elliptic genera of ADE-type M-strings in 6d (2,0) SCFTs from their modularity and explore the relation to topological string partition functions. We find a novel kinematical constraint that elliptic genera should follow, which determines elliptic genera at low base degrees and helps us to conjecture a vanishing bound for the refined Gopakumar-Vafa invariants of related geometries. Using this, we can bootstrap the elliptic genera to arbitrary base degree, including D/E-type theories for which explicit formulas are only partially known. We utilize our results to obtain the 6d Cardy formulas and the superconformal indices for (2,0) theories.

We study conformal boundary conditions for the theory of a single real scalar to investigate whether the known Dirichlet and Neumann conditions are the only possibilities. For this free bulk theory there are strong restrictions on the possible boundary dynamics. In particular, we find that the bulk-to-boundary operator expansion of the bulk field involves at most a `shadow pair' of boundary fields, irrespective of the conformal boundary condition. We numerically analyze the four-point crossing equations for this shadow pair in the case of a three-dimensional boundary (so a four-dimensional scalar field) and find that large ranges of parameter space are excluded. However a `kink' in the numerical bounds obeys all our consistency checks and might be an indication of a new conformal boundary condition.