Local Renormalization Group Equation Research Articles

Nonlocal quantum effective actions in Weyl-Flat spacetimes

Virtual massless particles in quantum loops lead to nonlocal effects which can have interesting consequences, for example, for primordial magnetogenesis in cosmology or for computing finite N corrections in holography. We describe how the quantum effective actions summarizing these effects can be computed efficiently for Weyl-flat metrics by integrating the Weyl anomaly or, equivalently, the local renormalization group equation. This method relies only on the local Schwinger-DeWitt expansion of the heat kernel and allows for a re-summation of the anomalous leading large logarithms of the scale factor, log a(x), in situations where the Weyl factor changes by several e-foldings. As an illustration, we obtain the quantum effective action for the Yang-Mills field coupled to massless matter, and the self-interacting massless scalar field. Our action reduces to the nonlocal action obtained using the Barvinsky-Vilkovisky covariant perturbation theory in the regime R2 ≪ ∇2R for a typical curvature scale R, but has a greater range of validity effectively re-summing the covariant perturbation theory to all orders in curvatures. In particular, it is applicable also in the opposite regime R2 ≫ ∇2R, which is often of interest in cosmology.

AdS/CFT and local renormalization group with gauge fields: Table 1.

We revisit a study of local renormalization group (RG) with background gauge fields incorporated using the AdS/CFT correspondence. Starting with a $(d+1)$-dimensional bulk gravity coupled to scalars and gauge fields, we derive a local RG equation from a flow equation by working in the Hamilton-Jacobi formulation of the bulk theory. The Gauss's law constraint associated with gauge symmetry plays an important role. RG flows of the background gauge fields are governed by vector $\beta$-functions, and some interesting properties of them are known to follow. We give a systematic rederivation of them on the basis of the flow equation. Fixing an ambiguity of local counterterms in such a manner that is natural from the viewpoint of the flow equation, we determine all the coefficients uniquely appearing in the trace of the stress tensor for $d=4$. A relation between a choice of schemes and a Virial current is discussed. As a consistency check, these are found to satisfy the integrability conditions of local RG transformations. From these results, we are led to a proof of a holographic $c$-theorem by finding out a full family of schemes where a trace anomaly coefficient is related with a holographic $c$-function.

Holographic trace anomaly and local renormalization group

The Hamilton-Jacobi method in holography has produced important results both at a renormalization group (RG) fixed point and away from it. In this paper we use the Hamilton-Jacobi method to compute the holographic trace anomaly for four- and six-dimensional boundary conformal field theories (CFTs), assuming higher-derivative gravity and interactions of scalar fields in the bulk. The scalar field contributions to the anomaly appear in CFTs with exactly marginal operators. Moving away from the fixed point, we show that the Hamilton-Jacobi formalism provides a deep connection between the holographic and the local RG. We derive the local RG equation holographically, and verify explicitly that it satisfies Weyl consistency conditions stemming from the commutativity of Weyl scalings. We also consider massive scalar fields in the bulk corresponding to boundary relevant operators, and comment on their effects to the local RG equation.

Consequences of Weyl consistency conditions

The running of quantum field theories can be studied in detail with the use of a local renormalization group equation. The usual beta-function effects are easy to include, but by introducing spacetime-dependence of the various parameters of the theory one can efficiently incorporate renormalization effects of composite operators as well. An illustration of the power of these methods was presented by Osborn in the early 90s, who used consistency conditions following from the Abelian nature of the Weyl group to rederive Zamolodchikov’s c-theorem in d = 2 spacetime dimensions, and also to obtain a perturbative a-theorem in d = 4. In this work we present an extension of Osborn’s work to d = 6 and to general even d. We compute the full set of Weyl consistency conditions, and we discover among them a candidate for an a-theorem in d = 6, similar to the d = 2, 4 cases studied by Osborn. Additionally, we show that in any even spacetime dimension one finds a consistency condition that may serve as a generalization of the c-theorem, and that the associated candidate c-function involves the coefficient of the Euler term in the trace anomaly. Such a generalization hinges on proving the positivity of a certain “metric” in the space of couplings.

A local renormalization group equation, diffeomorphisms and conformal invariance in sigma models

The conformal anomaly in two-dimensional curved spacetime sigma models of the type relevant in string theory is investigated. An explicit formula for the anomaly is presented in terms of functional derivatives of the generating functional (or effective action) with respect to local, i.e. explicitly position-dependent, background fields, the coefficients involving the corresponding renormalization group beta functions. Sufficient conditions for conformal invariance of the quantum sigma model follow immediately. The derivation uses the formal device of allowing the renormalization mass to become a local parameter, and the resulting local renormalization group equation is discussed in details. The subtle relation between finiteness and conformal invariance in these models is clarified, using a Ward identity for diffeomorphisms of the target manifold. The relevance of our work to string compactification is briefly discussed.