Odd Spacetime Dimensions Research Articles

Spin-refined partition functions and CRT black holes

We investigate spin-refined partition functions in AdS/CFT using Euclidean gravitational path integrals. We construct phase diagrams for ZX = Tr(e−βHX) in various dimensions and for different choices of discrete isometry X, discovering rich structures at finite temperature. When X is a reflection, ZX counts the difference between the number of even- and odd-spin microstates. The high-temperature regime is universally dominated by CRT-twisted black holes in any dimension, and in odd spacetime dimensions we examine whether complex rotating black hole solutions can contribute to spin-refined observables or potentially dominate at finite temperature. We also analyze the microcanonical ensemble. There the leading contribution almost always comes from rotating black holes, showing that the two ensembles are not necessarily equivalent.

Gravitational radiation from a binary system in odd-dimensional spacetime

We explore possible manifestations of an odd number of extra dimensions in gravitational radiation, which are associated with violation of Huygens' principle in flat odd-dimensional spacetime. Our setup can be regarded as the limit of an infinite compactification radius in ADD model and is not viable as realistic cosmology, but it still may be useful as a simple analytically solvable model catching certain features of more realistic scenarios. The model consists of two point masses moving inside a flat three-dimensional brane, embedded in a five-dimensional Minkowski space and interacting only through a massless scalar field localized on the same brane, while gravitational radiation is emitted into the bulk. This setup avoids the difficulties associated with taking into account the gravitational stresses binding the system, which require the cubic terms in the perturbative gravitational Lagrangian, and permits to limit ourselves to linearized theory. We calculate radiation in a linearized five-dimensional gravity generalizing the Rohrlich-Teitelboim approach to extract the emitted part of the retarded gravitational field. The source term consists of a local contribution from point particles and a non-local contribution from scalar field stresses, which is calculated using the DIRE approach to post-Newtonian expansions. In the nonrelativistic limit, we find an analog of the quadrupole formula containing an integral over the history of the particles' motion preceding the retarded time. We also show that, for an observer on the brane, the radiation contains a third polarization: the breathing mode.

Fermionic Condensate in de Sitter Spacetime

Fermionic condensate is investigated in $(D+1)$-dimensional de Sitter spacetime by using the cutoff function regularization. In order to fix the renormalization ambiguity for massive fields an additional condition is imposed, requiring the condensate to vanish in the infinite mass limit. For large values of the field mass the condensate decays exponentially in odd dimensional spacetimes and follows a power law decay in even dimensional spacetimes. For a massless field the fermionic condensate vanishes for odd values of the spatial dimension $D$ and is nonzero for even $D$. Depending on the spatial dimension the fermionic condensate can be either positive or negative. The change in the sign of the condensate may lead to instabilities in interacting field theories.

Electromagnetic and gravitational radiation in all dimensions: A classical field theory treatment

How long does a light bulb shine in odd dimensional flat spacetimes, according to a distant observer? This question is non-trivial because electromagnetic and gravitational waves, despite being comprised of massless particles, can develop tails: they travel inside the light cone. To this end, I attempt to close a gap in the literature by first deriving, strictly within classical field theory, the real-time electromagnetic dipole and gravitational quadrupole energy and angular momentum radiation formulas in all relevant dimensions. The even dimensional case, where massless signals travel strictly on the null cone, depends on the time derivatives of the dipoles and quadrupoles solely at retarded time; whereas the odd dimensional ones involve an integral over their retarded histories. Despite the propagation of light inside the null cone, however, I argue that a monochromatic light bulb of some intrinsic duration in odd dimensions remains approximately the same apparent duration to a distant detector, though the tail effect does produce a phase shift and adds to the signal several transitory non-oscillatory inverse square roots in time.

Inversion of statistics and thermalization in the Unruh effect

We derive a master equation for the reduced density matrix of a uniformly accelerating quantum detector in arbitrary dimensions, generically coupled to a field initially in its vacuum state, and analyze its late time regime. We find that such density matrix asymptotically reaches a Gibbs state. The particularities of its evolution towards this state are encoded in the response function, which depends on the dimension, the properties of the fields, and the specific coupling to them. We also compare this situation with the thermalization of a static detector immersed in a thermal field state, pinpointing the differences between both scenarios. In particular, we analyze the role of the response function and its effect on the evolution of the detector towards equilibrium. Furthermore, we explore the consequences of the well-known statistics inversion of the response function of an Unruh-DeWitt detector linearly coupled to a free scalar field in odd spacetime dimensions. This allows us to specify in which sense accelerated detectors in Minkowski vacuum behave as static detectors in a thermal bath and in which sense they do not.

Synchrotron radiation in odd dimensions

In odd space-time dimensions, the retarded solution of the massless wave equation has support not only on the light cone, but also inside it. At the same time, a free massless field should propagate at the speed of light. The apparent contradiction of these two features is resolved by the fact that the emitted part of the field in the wave zone depends on the history of motion up to the retarded moment of proper time. It is shown that in the case of circular motion with ultrarelativistic velocity, the main contribution to the radiation amplitude is made by a small interval of proper time preceding the retarded time, and thus the tail term is effectively localized. We obtain a tentative formula for scalar synchrotron radiation in $D$ dimensions: $P =g^2(\omega_0\gamma^2/\sqrt{3})^{D-2}$, which is explicitly verified in $D=3,\,4,\,5$.

Entanglement entropy in generalised quantum Lifshitz models

We compute universal finite corrections to entanglement entropy for generalised quantum Lifshitz models in arbitrary odd spacetime dimensions. These are generalised free field theories with Lifshitz scaling symmetry, where the dynamical critical exponent z equals the number of spatial dimensions d, and which generalise the 2+1-dimensional quantum Lifshitz model to higher dimensions. We analyse two cases: one where the spatial manifold is a d-dimensional sphere and the entanglement entropy is evaluated for a hemisphere, and another where a d-dimensional flat torus is divided into two cylinders. In both examples the finite universal terms in the entanglement entropy are scale invariant and depend on the compactification radius of the scalar field.

Asymptotic structure of electromagnetism in higher spacetime dimensions

We investigate the asymptotic structure of electromagnetism in Minkowski space in even and odd spacetime dimensions $\geq 4$. We focus on $d>4$ since the case $d=4$ has been studied previously at length. We first consider spatial infinity where we provide explicit boundary conditions that admit the known physical solutions and make the formalism well defined (finite symplectic structure and charges). Contrary to the situation found in $d=4$ dimensions, there is no need to impose parity conditions under the antipodal map on the leading order of the fields when $d>4$. There is, however, the same need to modify the standard bulk symplectic form by a boundary term at infinity involving a surface degree of freedom. This step makes the Lorentz boosts act canonically. Because of the absence of parity conditions, the theory is found to be invariant under two independent algebras of angle-dependent $u(1)$ transformations ($d>4$). We then integrate the equations of motion in order to find the behaviour of the fields near null infinity. We exhibit the radiative and Coulomb branches, characterized by different decays and parities. The analysis yields generalized matching conditions between the past of $\mathscr{I}^+$ and the future of $\mathscr{I} ^-$.

Extended Quantum Field Theory, Index Theory, and the Parity Anomaly

We use techniques from functorial quantum field theory to provide a geometric description of the parity anomaly in fermionic systems coupled to background gauge and gravitational fields on odd-dimensional spacetimes. We give an explicit construction of a geometric cobordism bicategory which incorporates general background fields in a stack, and together with the theory of symmetric monoidal bicategories we use it to provide the concrete forms of invertible extended quantum field theories which capture anomalies in both the path integral and Hamiltonian frameworks. Specialising this situation by using the extension of the Atiyah-Patodi-Singer index theorem to manifolds with corners due to Loya and Melrose, we obtain a new Hamiltonian perspective on the parity anomaly. We compute explicitly the 2-cocycle of the projective representation of the gauge symmetry on the quantum state space, which is defined in a parity-symmetric way by suitably augmenting the standard chiral fermionic Fock spaces with Lagrangian subspaces of zero modes of the Dirac Hamiltonian that naturally appear in the index theorem. We describe the significance of our constructions for the bulk-boundary correspondence in a large class of time-reversal invariant gauge-gravity symmetry-protected topological phases of quantum matter with gapless charged boundary fermions, including the standard topological insulator in 3+1 dimensions.

Memory effect for particle scattering in odd spacetime dimensions

We investigate the gravitational memory effect for linearized perturbations off of Minkowski space in odd spacetime dimensions $d$ by examining the effects of gravitational radiation from classical point particle scattering. We also investigate analogous memory effects for electromagnetic and scalar radiation. We find that there is no gravitational memory effect in all odd dimensions. For scalar and electromagnetic fields, there is no memory effect for $d\ensuremath{\ge}7$; for $d=3$ there is an infinite momentum memory effect, whereas for $d=5$ there is no momentum memory effect but the displacement of a test particle will grow unboundedly with time. Our results are further elucidated by analyzing the memory effect for any slowly moving source of compact spatial support in odd dimensions.

Fermionic currents in AdS spacetime with compact dimensions

We derive a closed expression for the vacuum expectation value (VEV) of the fermionic current density in a (D+1)-dimensional locally AdS spacetime with an arbitrary number of toroidally compactified Poincare spatial dimensions and in the presence of a constant gauge field. The latter can be formally interpreted in terms of a magnetic flux treading the compact dimensions. In the compact subspace, the field operator obeys quasiperiodicity conditions with arbitrary phases. The VEV of the charge density is zero and the current density has nonzero components along the compact dimensions only. They are periodic functions of the magnetic flux with the period equal to the flux quantum and tend to zero on the AdS boundary. Near the horizon, the effect of the background gravitational field is small and the leading term in the corresponding asymptotic expansion coincides with the VEV for a massless field in the locally Minkowski bulk. Unlike the Minkowskian case, in the system consisting an equal number of fermionic and scalar degrees of freedom, with same masses, charges and phases in the periodicity conditions, the total current density does not vanish. In these systems, the leading divergences in the scalar and fermionic contributions on the horizon are canceled and, as a consequence of that, the charge flux, integrated over the coordinate perpendicular to the AdS boundary, becomes finite. We show that in odd spacetime dimensions the fermionic fields realizing two inequivalent representations of the Clifford algebra and having equal phases in the periodicity conditions give the same contribution to the VEV of the current density. Combining the contributions from these fields, the current density in odd-dimensional C-,P- and T -symmetric models are obtained. As an application, we consider the ground state current density in curved carbon nanotubes.

Perturbative and global anomalies in bosonic analogs of integer quantum Hall and topological insulator phases

We study perturbative and global anomalies at the boundaries of bosonic analogues of integer quantum Hall (BIQH) and topological insulator (BTI) phases using a description of the boundaries of these phases in terms of a nonlinear sigma model (NLSM) with Wess-Zumino term. One of the main results of the paper is that these anomalies are robust against arbitrary smooth deformations of the target space of the NLSM which describes the phase, provided that the deformations also respect the symmetry of the phase. In the first part of the paper we discuss the perturbative $U(1)$ anomaly at the boundary of BIQH states in all odd (spacetime) dimensions. In the second part we study global anomalies at the boundary of BTI states in even dimensions. In a previous work [Phys. Rev. B 95, 035149 (2017)] we argued that the boundary of the BTI phase exhibits a global anomaly which is an analogue of the parity anomaly of Dirac fermions in three dimensions. Here we elevate this argument to a proof for the boundary of the two-dimensional BTI state by explicitly computing the partition function of the gauged NLSM describing the boundary. We then use the powerful equivariant localization technique to show that this global anomaly is robust against all smooth deformations of the target space of the NLSM which preserve the $U(1)\rtimes\mathbb{Z}_2$ symmetry of the BTI state. We also comment on the difficulties of generalizing this latter proof to higher dimensions. Finally, we discuss the expected low energy behavior of the boundary theories studied in this paper when the coupling constants are allowed to flow under the renormalization group.

Characteristic classes in general relativity on a modified Poincaré curvature bundle

Characteristic classes in space-time manifolds are discussed for both even- and odd-dimensional spacetimes. In particular, it is shown that the Einstein–Hilbert action is equivalent to a second Chern-class on a modified Poincaré bundle in four dimensions. Consequently, the cosmological constant and the trace of an energy-momentum tensor become divisible modulo R/Z.

Topological electromagnetic responses of bosonic quantum Hall, topological insulator, and chiral semimetal phases in all dimensions

We calculate the topological part of the electromagnetic response of Bosonic Integer Quantum Hall (BIQH) phases in odd (spacetime) dimensions, and Bosonic Topological Insulator (BTI) and Bosonic chiral semi-metal (BCSM) phases in even dimensions. To do this we use the Nonlinear Sigma Model (NLSM) description of bosonic symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phases, and the method of gauged Wess-Zumino (WZ) actions. We find the surprising result that for BIQH states in dimension $2m-1$ ($m=1,2,\dots$), the bulk response to an electromagnetic field $A_{\mu}$ is characterized by a Chern-Simons term for $A_{\mu}$ with a level quantized in integer multiples of $m!$ (factorial). We also show that BTI states (which have an extra $\mathbb{Z}_2$ symmetry) can exhibit a $\mathbb{Z}_2$ breaking Quantum Hall effect on their boundaries, with this boundary Quantum Hall effect described by a Chern-Simons term at level $\frac{m!}{2}$. We show that the factor of $m!$ can be understood by requiring gauge invariance of the exponential of the Chern-Simons term on a general Euclidean manifold, and we also use this argument to characterize the electromagnetic and gravitational responses of fermionic SPT phases with $U(1)$ symmetry in all odd dimensions. We then use our gauged boundary actions for the BIQH and BTI states to (i) construct a bosonic analogue of a chiral semi-metal (BCSM) in even dimensions, (ii) show that the boundary of the BTI state exhibits a bosonic analogue of the parity anomaly of Dirac fermions in odd dimensions, and (iii) study anomaly inflow at domain walls on the boundary of BTI states. In a series of Appendices we derive important formulas and additional results. In particular, in Appendix A we use the connection between equivariant cohomology and gauged WZ actions to give a mathematical interpretation of the actions for the BIQH and BTI boundaries constructed in this paper.

Static Einstein–Maxwell Magnetic Solitons and Black Holes in an Odd Dimensional AdS Spacetime

We construct a new class of Einstein–Maxwell static solutions with a magnetic field in D-dimensions (with D ≥ 5 an odd number), approaching at infinity a globally Anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime. In addition to the mass, the new solutions possess an extra-parameter associated with a non-zero magnitude of the magnetic potential at infinity. Some of the black holes possess a non-trivial zero-horizon size limit, which corresponds to a solitonic deformation of the AdS background.

Finite quantum gauge theories

We explicitly compute the one-loop exact beta function for a nonlocal extension of the standard gauge theory, in particular Yang-Mills and QED. The theory, made of a weakly nonlocal kinetic term and a local potential of the gauge field, is unitary (ghost-free) and perturbatively super-renormalizable. Moreover, in the action we can always choose the potential (consisting of one "killer operator") to make zero the beta function of running gauge coupling constant. The outcome is "a UV finite theory for any gauge interaction". Our calculations are done in D=4, but the results can be generalized to even or odd spacetime dimensions. We compute the contribution to the beta function from two different killer operators by using two independent techniques, namely the Feynman diagrams and the Barvinsky-Vilkovisky traces. By making the theories finite we are able to solve also the Landau pole problems, in particular in QED. Without any potential the beta function of the one-loop super-renormalizable theory shows a universal Landau pole in the running coupling constant in the ultraviolet regime (UV), regardless of the specific higher-derivative structure. However, the dressed propagator shows neither the Landau pole in the UV, nor the singularities in the infrared regime (IR).

Anomalies, entropy, and boundaries

A relation between the conformal anomaly and the logarithmic term in the entanglement entropy is known to exist for CFT's in even dimensions. In odd dimensions the local anomaly and the logarithmic term in the entropy are absent. As was observed recently, there exists a non-trivial integrated anomaly if an odd-dimensional spacetime has boundaries. We show that, similarly, there exists a logarithmic term in the entanglement entropy when the entangling surface crosses the boundary of spacetime. The relation of the entanglement entropy to the integrated conformal anomaly is elaborated for three-dimensional theories. Distributional properties of intrinsic and extrinsic geometries of the boundary in the presence of conical singularities in the bulk are established. This allows one to find contributions to the entropy that depend on the relative angle between the boundary and the entangling surface.

Hydrodynamics of the Polyakov line in SU(Nc) Yang–Mills

We discuss a hydrodynamical description of the eigenvalues of the Polyakov line at large but finite Nc for Yang–Mills theory in even and odd space-time dimensions. The hydro-static solutions for the eigenvalue densities are shown to interpolate between a uniform distribution in the confined phase and a localized distribution in the de-confined phase. The resulting critical temperatures are in overall agreement with those measured on the lattice over a broad range of Nc, and are consistent with the string model results at Nc=∞. The stochastic relaxation of the eigenvalues of the Polyakov line out of equilibrium is captured by a hydrodynamical instanton. An estimate of the probability of formation of a Z(Nc) bubble using a piece-wise sound wave is suggested.

Charged isotropic non-Abelian dyonic black branes

We construct black holes with a Ricci-flat horizon in Einstein–Yang–Mills theory with a negative cosmological constant, which approach asymptotically an AdSd spacetime background (with d≥4). These solutions are isotropic, i.e. all space directions in a hypersurface of constant radial and time coordinates are equivalent, and possess both electric and magnetic fields. We find that the basic properties of the non-Abelian solutions are similar to those of the dyonic isotropic branes in Einstein–Maxwell theory (which, however, exist in even spacetime dimensions only). These black branes possess a nonzero magnetic field strength on the flat boundary metric, which leads to a divergent mass of these solutions, as defined in the usual way. However, a different picture is found for odd spacetime dimensions, where a non-Abelian Chern–Simons term can be incorporated in the action. This allows for black brane solutions with a magnetic field which vanishes asymptotically.

Finite temperature fermionic condensate and currents in topologically nontrivial spaces

We investigate the finite temperature fermionic condensate and the expectation values of the charge and current densities for a massive fermion field in a spacetime background with an arbitrary number of toroidally compactified spatial dimensions in the presence of a nonvanishing chemical potential. Periodicity conditions along compact dimensions are taken with arbitrary phases and the presence of a constant gauge field is assumed. The latter gives rise to Aharonov-Bohm-like effects on the expectation values. They are periodic functions of magnetic fluxes enclosed by compact dimensions with the period equal to the flux quantum. The current density has nonzero components along compact dimensions only. Both low- and high-temperature asymptotics of the expectation values are studied. In particular, it has been shown that at high temperatures the current density is exponentially suppressed. This behavior is in sharp contrast with the corresponding asymptotic in the case of a scalar field, where the current density linearly grows with the temperature. The features for the models in odd-dimensional spacetimes are discussed. Applications are given to cylindrical and toroidal nanotubes described within the framework of effective Dirac theory for the electronic subsystem.