Quantcast
  • Register
PhysicsOverflow is a next-generation academic platform for physicists and astronomers, including a community peer review system and a postgraduate-level discussion forum analogous to MathOverflow.

Welcome to PhysicsOverflow! PhysicsOverflow is an open platform for community peer review and graduate-level Physics discussion.

Please help promote PhysicsOverflow ads elsewhere if you like it.

News

PO is now at the Physics Department of Bielefeld University!

New printer friendly PO pages!

Migration to Bielefeld University was successful!

Please vote for this year's PhysicsOverflow ads!

Please do help out in categorising submissions. Submit a paper to PhysicsOverflow!

... see more

Tools for paper authors

Submit paper
Claim Paper Authorship

Tools for SE users

Search User
Reclaim SE Account
Request Account Merger
Nativise imported posts
Claim post (deleted users)
Import SE post

Users whose questions have been imported from Physics Stack Exchange, Theoretical Physics Stack Exchange, or any other Stack Exchange site are kindly requested to reclaim their account and not to register as a new user.

Public \(\beta\) tools

Report a bug with a feature
Request a new functionality
404 page design
Send feedback

Attributions

(propose a free ad)

Site Statistics

205 submissions , 163 unreviewed
5,047 questions , 2,200 unanswered
5,345 answers , 22,709 comments
1,470 users with positive rep
816 active unimported users
More ...

  Constructive vs Algebraic Quantum Field Theory

+ 6 like - 0 dislike
631 views

I am interested to know how the (non)existence theorems of constructive QFT and algebraic QFT are related (or not). I have only a weak grasp of either, so I'm looking for something like a quick overview. Here's how I understand things:

Constructive QFT has shown that quantum fields can be well-defined in $d$ < 4, by showing that the distributions and interactions exist in that case. Apparently there are specific examples, but this is an existence result for 1) techniques coming from analysis, 2) $d$ < 4, and 3) interactions are included.

Algebraic QFT comes from looking at the canonical commutation relations on spacetime, and has shown that a single Hilbert space cannot represent both the interacting and non-interaction picture (I think this is one statement of Haag's theorem). So this is a non-existence result 1) based on the algebra of CCR and 2) includes interactions (apparently a way out is to assume periodic boundary conditions - I'm not overly interested in that part).

So several specific questions - can I think of these as a Lagrangian vs Hamiltonian picture? What do these two results mean to each other - are they even related at all since they are essentially QFT in different dimensions?

References with reviews of these theories would be nice - I've checked out Haag's book enough to know that if I spent time I could probably understand it, but I'd rather good review articles if anyone knows of any.

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-04-25 01:57 (UCT), posted by SE-user levitopher
asked Nov 25, 2013 in Theoretical Physics by levitopher (160 points) [ no revision ]
Related: mathoverflow.net/q/155101/13917

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-04-25 01:57 (UCT), posted by SE-user Qmechanic

1 Answer

+ 6 like - 0 dislike

The no-go results from Algebraic and Constructive QFT you mention deal with related but slightly different matters.

(Edit: the previous version of the following paragraph was slightly misleading - Haag's theorem is actually stronger than I stated before; see below for details)

  • Haag's theorem (which actually slightly predates the inception of Algebraic QFT) tells us that we cannot write interaction picture dynamics within Hilbert spaces which are free field representations of the CCR's. This is not the same as to say that interacting dynamics does not exist at all - it simply says that we cannot implement it as unitary operators in the interaction picture. This is done by showing that the possibility to do so in some Hilbert space does imply that we are dealing with a free field representation of the CCR's. The argument is closed by a "soft triviality" result by Jost, Schroer and Pohlmeyer arguing that the latter implies that all truncated $n$-point functions vanish for $n>2$, hence the field is really free - in particular, the "interaction Hamiltonian" is zero.

This has consequences for both scattering theory and attempts to rigorously construct field theoretical models starting from free fields. In the first case, Haag's theorem is circumvented by either the LSZ of Haag-Ruelle scattering formalisms, which obtain the S-matrix by respectively taking infinite time limits in the weak (matrix elements) and strong (Hilbert space vectors) sense. Recall that both setups require the assumption of a mass gap in the joint energy-momentum spectrum (i.e. an isolated, non-zero mass shell), otherwise we run into the notorious "infrared catastrophe", which is dealt with using "non-recoil" (i.e. Bloch-Nordsieck) approximation methods in formal perturbation theory but remains a challenge in a more rigorous setting, save in some non-relativistic models. In the second case, one is led to consider representations of the CCR's which are inequivalent to free field ones. Since field theories living in the whole space-time have infinite degrees of freedom, the Stone-von Neumann uniqueness theorem no longer holds (actually, Haag's theorem can be seen as a manifestation of this particular failure mechanism), and hence such representations should exist in abundance. Motivated by these results, Algebraic QFT was devised with a focus on structural (i.e. "model-independent") aspects of QFT in a way that does not depend on a particular representation; on other front, one may also try to explore this abundance of representations to construct models rigorously, which brings us to the realm of Constructive QFT.

  • The "existence" (a.k.a "non-triviality") and "non-existence" (a.k.a. "triviality") results in Constructive QFT tell us which interactions survive after non-perturbative renormalization. More precisely, you construct field theoretical models in a mathematically rigorous way by first considering "truncated" interacting theories (i.e. with UV and IR cutoffs), and then carefully removing the cutoffs in a sequence of controlled operations. The resulting model may be interacting (i.e. "non-trivial") or not (i.e. "trivial"), in the sense that its truncated $n$-point correlation functions for $n>2$ may be respectively non-vanishing or not. In the first case, any representation of the CCR's in the Hilbert space where the interacting vacuum state vector lives is necessarily inequivalent to a free field one - in particular, one cannot write the interacting dynamics as unitary operators in the interaction picture, in accordance with Haag's theorem. In the second case, you really obtain a free field representation of the CCR's, but here because renormalization has completely killed the interaction.

Finally, it is important to notice that triviality of a model may stem from reasons unrelated to the underlying mechanism of Haag's theorem. The latter, once more, is a consequence of having an infinite number of degrees of freedom in infinite volumes (this theorem does not hold "in a box", for instance), whereas the former usually derives from an interaction which has too singular a short-distance behavior, as argued in the previous paragraph. This can be intuitively be understood by the (local) singularity and (global) integrability of the free field's Green functions: the lower the space-time dimension, the better the singular (UV) behaviour and the worse the integrability (IR) behaviour, and vice-versa. That's the underlying reason why $\lambda\phi^4$ scalar models are super-renormalizable in 2 and 3 dimensions (having only tadpole Feynman graphs as divergent in 2 dimensions) and non-perturbatively trivial in $>4$ dimensions.

Ah, I've almost forgotten about the references: in my opinion, the best discussion of triviality results in QFT from a rigorous viewpoint is the book by R. Fernández, J. Fröhlich and A. D. Sokal, "Random Walks, Critical Phenomena, and Triviality in Quantum Field Theory" (Springer-Verlag, 1992), specially Chapter 13. There both the above "hard triviality" results for $\lambda\phi^4$ models and "soft triviality results" such as the Jost-Schroer-Pohlmeyer theorem (which underlies Haag's theorem, as mentioned at the beginning of my answer) are discussed. The book is not exactly for the faint of the heart, but the first sections of this Chapter provide a good discussion of the statements of the theorems, before proceeding to the proofs of the above "hard triviality" results. For a detailed discussion of Jost-Schroer-Pohlmeyer's and Haag's theorems, as well as their proofs, I recommend the book of J. T. Lopuszanski, "An Introduction to Symmetry and Supersymmetry in Quantum Field Theory" (World Scientific, 1991). The classic book of R. F. Streater and A. S. Wightman, "PCT, Spin and Statistics, and All That" (Princeton Univ. Press) also discusses these two results.

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-04-25 01:57 (UCT), posted by SE-user Pedro Lauridsen Ribeiro
answered Nov 25, 2013 by Pedro Lauridsen Ribeiro (580 points) [ no revision ]

Your answer

Please use answers only to (at least partly) answer questions. To comment, discuss, or ask for clarification, leave a comment instead.
To mask links under text, please type your text, highlight it, and click the "link" button. You can then enter your link URL.
Please consult the FAQ for as to how to format your post.
This is the answer box; if you want to write a comment instead, please use the 'add comment' button.
Live preview (may slow down editor)   Preview
Your name to display (optional):
Privacy: Your email address will only be used for sending these notifications.
Anti-spam verification:
If you are a human please identify the position of the character covered by the symbol $\varnothing$ in the following word:
p$\hbar$ysi$\varnothing$sOverflow
Then drag the red bullet below over the corresponding character of our banner. When you drop it there, the bullet changes to green (on slow internet connections after a few seconds).
Please complete the anti-spam verification




user contributions licensed under cc by-sa 3.0 with attribution required

Your rights
...