Quantum Extremism: Effective Potential and Extremal Paths
High Energy Physics - Theory
2010-01-06 v1
Abstract
The reality and convexity of the effective potential in quantum field theories has been studied extensively in the context of Euclidean space-time. It has been shown that canonical and path-integral approaches may yield different results, thus resolving the `convexity problem'. We discuss the transferral of these treatments to Minkowskian space-time, which also necessitates a careful discussion of precisely which field configurations give the dominant contributions to the path integral. In particular, we study the effective potential for the N=1 linear sigma model.
Cite
@article{arxiv.0907.1174,
title = {Quantum Extremism: Effective Potential and Extremal Paths},
author = {E. N. Argyres and M. T. M. van Kessel and R. H. P. Kleiss},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0907.1174},
year = {2010}
}
Comments
11 pages, 4 figures