Non-perturbative Effective Action Research Articles

Effective Field Theory islands from perturbative and nonperturbative four-graviton amplitudes

Theoretical data obtained from physically sensible field and string theory models suggest that gravitational Effective Field Theories (EFTs) live on islands that are tiny compared to current general bounds determined from unitarity, causality, crossing symmetry, and a good high-energy behavior. In this work, we present explicit perturbative and nonperturbative 2 → 2 graviton scattering amplitudes and their associated low-energy expansion in spacetime dimensions D ≥ 4 to support this notion. Our new results include a first example of gravity weakly coupled to a nonperturbative effective action. We show that, at energies below the mass of its nonperturbative matter, the D = 4, mathcal{N} = 1 supersymmetric field theory in the confined phase lies on the same islands identified using four-dimensional perturbative models based on string theory and minimally-coupled matter circulating a loop. Furthermore, we generalize the previous four-dimensional perturbative models based on string theory and minimally-coupled massive spin-0 and spin-1 states circulating in the loop to D dimensions. Remarkably, we again find that the low-energy EFT coefficients lie on small islands. These results offer a useful guide towards constraining possible extensions of Einstein gravity.

Modular symmetries and the swampland conjectures

Recent string theory tests of swampland ideas like the distance or the dS conjectures have been performed at weak coupling. Testing these ideas beyond the weak coupling regime remains challenging. We propose to exploit the modular symmetries of the moduli effective action to check swampland constraints beyond perturbation theory. As an example we study the case of heterotic 4d mathcal{N}=1 compactifications, whose non-perturbative effective action is known to be invariant under modular symmetries acting on the Kähler and complex structure moduli, in particular SL(2, Z) T-dualities (or subgroups thereof) for 4d heterotic or orbifold compactifications. Remarkably, in models with non-perturbative superpotentials, the corresponding duality invariant potentials diverge at points at infinite distance in moduli space. The divergence relates to towers of states becoming light, in agreement with the distance conjecture. We discuss specific examples of this behavior based on gaugino condensation in heterotic orbifolds. We show that these examples are dual to compactifications of type I’ or Horava-Witten theory, in which the SL(2, Z) acts on the complex structure of an underlying 2-torus, and the tower of light states correspond to D0-branes or M-theory KK modes. The non-perturbative examples explored point to potentials not leading to weak coupling at infinite distance, but rather diverging in the asymptotic corners of moduli space, dynamically forbidding the access to points with global symmetries. We perform a study of general modular invariant potentials and find that there are dS maxima and saddle points but no dS minima, and that all examples explored obey the refined dS conjecture.

Nonperturbative one-loop effective action for QED with Yukawa couplings

We derive the one-loop effective action for scalar, pseudoscalar, and electromagnetic fields coupled to a Dirac fermion in an extension of QED with Yukawa couplings. Using the Schwinger proper-time formalism and zeta-function regularization, we calculate the full nonperturbative effective action to one loop in the constant background field approximation. Our result is nonperturbative in the external fields, and goes beyond existing results in the literature which treat only the first nontrivial order involving the pseudoscalar. The result has an even and odd part, which are related to the modulus and phase of the fermion functional determinant. The even contribution to the effective action involves the modulus of the effective Yukawa couplings and is invariant under global chiral transformations while the odd contribution is proportional to the angle between the scalar and pseudoscalar couplings. In different limits the effective action reduces either to the Euler–Heisenberg effective action or the Coleman–Weinberg potential. We also comment on the relationship between the odd part of the effective action and the chiral anomaly in QED.

Non-perturbative Effective Action in Gauge Theories and Quantum Gravity

We use our recently developed algebraic methods for the calculation of the heat kernel on homogeneous bundles over symmetric spaces to evaluate the non-perturbative low-energy effective action in quantum general relativity and Yang-Mills gauge theory in curved space. We obtain an exact integral repesentation for the effective action that generates all terms in the standard asymptotic epxansion of the effective action without derivatives of the curvatures effectively summing up the whole infinite subseries of all quantum corrections with low momenta.

Nonperturbative effective action of theN=1 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory

Nonperturbative effective action of theN=1 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory