BV quantization of the Rozansky-Witten model (Q2408548)

The famous Rozansky-Witten model is an interesting 3-dimensional \(\sigma\)-model whose target space is given by a holomorphic symplectic manifold. The main goal of the present paper is to apply the pioneering work of Costello to construct a quantization of the Rozansky-Witten model in the Batalin-Vilkovisky (BV) formalism and investigate its observable theory. The BV formalism has been invented with the aim of solving the problem of quantizing a nonabelian gauge theory using the path integral approach. The BV formalism, as a far-reaching extension of BRST formalism, is a powerful method to analyze the nature of the gauge symmetries in gauge theories. The authors show that the BV quantization (in Costello's sense) of the model, which produces a perturbative quantum field theory, can be obtained via the configuration space method of regularization due to Kontsevich. To apply Costello's (homological) method of renormalization, the paper under review focuses only on the perturbative aspects of the Rozansky-Witten model. So instead of considering the full mapping space, it describes the classical theory only in a formal neighborhood of the space of constant maps, and this is done using the geometry of holomorphic Weyl bundles. Then the BV quantization of the model is studied. Such a quantization amounts to constructing an effective action (as a modification of the classical action functional) compatible with the renormalization group flow and satisfying the quantum master equation (a homological condition which essentially guarantees that the path integrals are well-defined). The effective action is defined as a sum over Feynman diagrams. In general, singularities may occur in the Feynman weights (due to the infinite dimensional nature of the mapping space) and one needs to add counter terms to the action to remove the singularities. The perturbative quantization of the model presented in the paper under review can be constructed without dealing directly with the singularities and counter terms. In particular, it is shown that the so-called naive quantization (with certain local quantum corrections taken into account) already satisfies the quantum master equation (QME), and hence the obtained quantized theory is independent of the chosen metric.