Vacuum energy and renormalization on the edge

Abstract

The vacuum dependence on boundary conditions in quantum field theories is analysed from a very general viewpoint. From this perspective, the renormalization prescriptions not only imply the renormalization of the couplings of the theory in the bulk but also the appearance of a flow in the space of boundary conditions. For regular boundaries, this flow has a large variety of fixed points and no cyclic orbit. The family of fixed points includes Neumann and Dirichlet boundary conditions. In one-dimensional field theories, pseudo-periodic and quasi-periodic boundary conditions are also RG fixed points. Under these conditions massless bosonic free field theories are conformally invariant. Among all fixed points only Neumann boundary conditions are infrared stable fixed points. All other conformal invariant boundary conditions become unstable under some relevant perturbations. In finite volumes, we analyse the dependence of the vacuum energy along the trajectories of the renormalization group flow providing an interesting framework for dark energy evolution. In contrast, the renormalization group flow on the boundary does not affect the leading behaviour of the entanglement entropy of the vacuum in one-dimensional conformally invariant bosonic theories.