English

Worldline approach for spinor fields in manifolds with boundaries

High Energy Physics - Theory 2024-06-25 v2

Abstract

The worldline formalism is a useful scheme in Quantum Field Theory which has also become a powerful tool for numerical computations. It is based on the first quantisation of a point-particle whose transition amplitudes correspond to the heat-kernel of the operator of quantum fluctuations of the field theory. However, to study a quantum field theory in a bounded manifold one needs to restrict the path integration domain of the point-particle to a specific subset of worldlines enclosed by those boundaries. In the present article it is shown how to implement this restriction for the case of a spinor field in a two-dimensional curved half-plane under MIT bag boundary conditions, and compute the first few heat-kernel coefficients as a verification of the proposed construction. This construction admits several generalisations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2403.00218,
  title  = {Worldline approach for spinor fields in manifolds with boundaries},
  author = {Lucas Manzo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.00218},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

34 pages, 1 figure. New version matches published version

R2 v1 2026-06-28T15:05:26.217Z