Quantum interactions between nonperturbative vacuum fields

Abstract

We develop an approach to investigate the non-perturbative dynamics of quantum field theories, in which specific vacuum field fluctuations are treated as the low-energy dynamical degrees of freedom, while all other vacuum field configurations are explicitly integrated out from the path integral. We show how to compute the effective interaction between the vacuum field degrees of freedom both perturbatively (using stochastic perturbation theory) and fully non-perturbatively (using lattice field theory simulations). The present approach holds to all orders in the couplings and does not rely on the semi-classical approximation.