Continuous Renormalization Group Analysis of Spectral Problems in Quantum Field Theory

Abstract

The isospectral renormalization group is a powerful method to analyze the spectrum of operators in quantum field theory. It was introduced in 1995 (see [2,4]) and since then it has been used to prove several results for non-relativistic quantum electrodynamics. After the introduction of the method there have been many works in which extensions, simplifications or clarifications are presented (see [7,11,13]). In this paper we present a new approach in which we construct a flow of operators parametrized by a continuous variable in the positive real axis. While this is in contrast to the discrete iteration used before, this is more in spirit of the original formulation of the renormalization group introduced in theoretical physics in 1974 [22]. The renormalization flow that we construct can be expressed in a simple way: it can be viewed as a single application of the Feshbach–Schur map with a clever selection of the spectral parameter. Another advantage of the method is that there exists a flow function for which the renormalization group that we present is the orbit under this flow of an initial Hamiltonian. This opens the possibility to study the problem using different techniques coming from the theory of evolution equations.