One-dimensional Chern-Simons theory

DOI10.1007/S00220-011-1290-1MaRDI QIDQ644752zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Anton Alekseev, Pavel Mnev

Publication date 7 November 2011

Published in Communications in Mathematical Physics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1005.2111, https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/71558/13/ZORA_NL_71558.pdf

zbMATH Keywords

Batalin-Vilkovisky formalismChern-Simons theoryeffective actionoperator formalismquantum master equationTQFT

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Applications of Lie groups to the sciences; explicit representations (22E70) Topological quantum field theories (aspects of differential topology) (57R56) Applications of manifolds of mappings to the sciences (58D30) Eta-invariants, Chern-Simons invariants (58J28) Open systems, reduced dynamics, master equations, decoherence (81S22) Path integrals in quantum mechanics (81S40) Topological field theories in quantum mechanics (81T45)

Abstract: We study a one-dimensional toy version of the Chern-Simons theory. We construct its simplicial version which comprises features of a low-energy effective gauge theory and of a topological quantum field theory in the sense of Atiyah.

Review text

A primary goal of quantum topology is to mathematically understand Chern-Simons invariants of \(3\)-manifolds, which are physically presented by path integrals. This paper studies a one-dimensional toy version of Chern-Simons theory, in the Batalin-Vilkovisky (BV) formalism, where the field takes values in a quadratic Lie algebra \(\mathfrak{g}\). To replace path integrals by finite dimensional integrals, the differential geometry of the circle is discretized by considering a differential graded Lie algebra (DGLA) structure on chains of a triangulation of the circle (a splitting of the circle into a finite number of segments) as a discrete analogue of a DGLA of \(\mathfrak{g}\)-valued differential forms. The effective action of the one-dimensional Chern-Simons theory on a triangulated circle is directly calculated by Theorem 1 (Equation 42). In order to show that this satisfies the appropriate analogue of the quantum master equation (QME), the effective action is reformulated using the operator formalism (Clifford algebras) in Theorem 2. Using this reformulation, in Sections 3.2.1 and 4.2, the authors construct an Atiyah-style topological quantum field theory (TQFT), associating operator-valued effective actions to triangulated one-dimensional cobordisms and sending concatenation of cobordisms to composition of operators, which is well-behaved with respect to simplicial aggregation (merging of simplices). The partition function is shown to satisfy a discrete version of the BV QME (Theorem 3), implying that the effective action of Theorem 1 satisfies the usual QME (Corollary 1). The hope is to gain insight for constructing a discrete version of \(3\)-dimensional Chern-Simons theory. Needless to say, that is a much more difficult problem, speculations about which are discussed in Section 1.3.

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Cites work

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Cited in

(14)

• Chiral charged fermions, one-dimensional quantum field theory and vertex algebras
• Batalin-Vilkovisky quantization and the algebraic index
• Constrained systems, generalized Hamilton-Jacobi actions, and quantization
• A taxonomy of twists of supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory
• Chern-Simons-Schrödinger theory on a one-dimensional lattice
• A cellular topological field theory
• Perturbative quantum gauge theories on manifolds with boundary
• Quantum Chern-Simons theories on cylinders: BV-BFV partition functions
• Classical BV theories on manifolds with boundary
• On the Kostant conjecture for Clifford algebras
• One-dimensional Chern-Simons theory and the \(\widehat{A}\) genus
• The matrix Chern-Simons one-form as a universal Chern-Simons theory
• On simplicial \(BF\) theory
• Quantum field theory as effective BV theory from Chern-Simons

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