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Effective potential for classical field theories subject to stochastic noise

Statistical Mechanics 2007-05-23 v3 chao-dyn High Energy Physics - Theory Chaotic Dynamics

Abstract

Classical field theories coupled to stochastic noise provide an extremely powerful tool for modeling phenomena as diverse as turbulence, pattern-formation, and the structural development of the universe itself. In this Letter we sketch a general formalism that maps such systems into a field theory language, and demonstrate how to extract the one-loop physics for an arbitrary classical field theory coupled to Gaussian noise. The amplitude of the noise two-point function serves as the loop-counting parameter and is the analog of Planck's constant hbar in quantum field theory. We define the effective action and the effective potential, and derive a general formula for the one-loop effective potential of a classical field theory coupled to translation-invariant Gaussian noise.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/9904207,
  title  = {Effective potential for classical field theories subject to stochastic noise},
  author = {David Hochberg and Carmen Molina-Paris and Juan Perez-Mercader and Matt Visser},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/9904207},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

5 pages, LaTeX 209, ReV_TeX 3.2. V2: Cosmetic changes to improve handling of Fadeev--Popov ghosts. V3: References updated. This paper has now been superseded and the contents of this paper have now been incorporated into cond-mat/9904215 [Phys. Rev. E60 (1999) 6343-6360]; cond-mat/9904391 [Physica A280 (2000) 437-455]; and cond-mat/9904413 [Phys. Lett. A, in press]