Loop corrections in Minkowski spacetime away from equilibrium. I: Late-time resummations

DOI10.1007/JHEP02(2023)093arXiv2206.11288MaRDI QIDQ6045643FDOQ6045643

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Publication date: 12 May 2023

Published in: Journal of High Energy Physics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: Loop corrections to unequal-time correlation functions in Minkowski spacetime exhibit secular growth due to a breakdown of time-dependent perturbation theory. This is analogous to secular growth in equal-time correlators on time-dependent backgrounds, except that in Minkowski the divergences must not signal a real IR issue. In this paper, we calculate the late-time limit of the two-point correlator for different massless self-interacting scalar quantum field theories on a Minkowski background. We first use a late-time version of the in-in path integral starting in the vacuum of the free theory; in this limit, the calculation, including UV renormalization, reduces to that in in-out. We find linear or logarithmic growth in time, depending on whether the interaction strength is dimension-one or dimensionless, respectively. We next develop the Weisskopf-Wigner resummation method, that proceeds by demanding unitarity within a truncated Hilbert space, to calculate the resummed correlator and find that it gives an exact exponentiation of the late-time perturbative result. The resummed (unequal-time) correlator thus decays with an exponential or polynomial time-dependence, which is suggestive of `universal' behavior that depends on the dimensions of the interaction strength.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.11288

zbMATH Keywords

effective field theoriesnon-equilibrium field theoryrenormalization and regularization

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Quantum theory (81-XX)

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Cited In (4)

• PBH formation in EFT of single field inflation with sharp transition
• In-in formalism for the entropy of quantum fields in curved spacetimes
• The in-out formalism for in-in correlators
• Quantum loop effects on the power spectrum and constraints on primordial black holes

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