Related papers: Constrained instantons in scalar field theories
Nucleation of branes by a four-form field has recently been considered in string motivated scenarios for the neutralization of the cosmological constant. An interesting question in this context is whether the nucleation of stacks of…
Many quantum field theories in one, two and four dimensions possess remarkable limits in which the instantons are present, the anti-instantons are absent, and the perturbative corrections are reduced to one-loop. We analyze the…
We study the massive Schwinger model, quantum electrodynamics of massive, Dirac fermions, in 1+1 dimensions; with space compactified to a circle. In the limit that transitions to fermion--anti-fermion pairs can be neglected, we study the…
In quantum mechanics and quantum field theory perturbation theory generically requires the inclusion of extra contributions non-perturbative in the coupling, such as instantons, to reproduce exact results. We show how full non-perturbative…
Constrained symplectic quantization is a functional formulation of quantum field theory in which quantum fluctuations are sampled through a deterministic Hamiltonian flow in an auxiliary intrinsic time $\tau$. In this paper we extend the…
We show that a scalar field conformally coupled to AdS gravity in four dimensions with a quartic self-interaction can be embedded into M-theory. The holographic effective potential is exactly calculated, allowing us to study…
It is shown that the contribution of the instantons to the fragmentation of quarks leads to the appearance of a imaginary part in diagrams of quark-quark scattering at large transfer momentum. The imaginary part comes from the analytical…
This is a self-contained set of lecture notes on instantons in (super) Yang-Mills theory in four dimensions and in quantum mechanics. First the basics are derived from scratch: the regular and singular one-instanton solutions for Yang-Mills…
We study instanton solutions and superpotentials for the large number of vacua of the plane-wave matrix model and a 2+1 dimensional Super Yang-Mills theory on $R\times S^2$ with sixteen supercharges. We get the superpotential in the weak…
We investigate the cosmological signatures of instantons mediating tunneling between de Sitter minima. For generic potentials the Coleman-de Luccia instanton does not necessarily exist; when it does not, the instanton which contributes to…
On an oriented, compact, connected, real four-dimensional manifold, $M$, we introduce a topological Lagrangian gauge field theory with a Bogomol'nyi structure that leads to non-singular, finite-Action, stable solutions to the variational…
We compute, from first principles, the quantum fluctuations about instanton saddle points of the Euclidean path integral for Einstein gravity coupled to a scalar field. The Euclidean two-point correlator is analytically continued into the…
D-brane instantons can perturb the quantum field theories on space-time filling D-branes by interesting operators. In some cases, these D-brane instantons are novel "stringy" effects (not interpretable directly as instanton effects in the…
We describe in detail a physical situation in which instantons are necessarily complex, not just Wick rotations of classical solutions to Euclidean spacetime. These complex instantons arise in the semiclassical evaluation of vacuum pair…
We analize instanton generated superpotentials for three dimensional N=2 supersymmetric gauge theories obtained by compactifying on S^1 N=1 four dimensional theories. In the N_f=1 case, we find that the vacua in the decompactification limit…
The influence of nonperturbative fields on instantons in quantum chromodynamics is studied. Nonperturbative vacuum is described in terms of nonlocal gauge invariant vacuum averages of gluon field strength. Effective action for instanton is…
We present an introduction to the use of noncommutative geometry for gauge theories with emphasis on a construction of instantons for a class of four dimensional toric noncommutative manifolds. These instantons are solutions of self-duality…
The binary interaction of large size instantons in a SU(2) Yang-Mills theory is obtained from the one-loop effective action for the field strength. The instanton interaction is calculated as a function of the instanton separation and in…
This introductory part of the author's PhD compilation thesis discusses non-perturbative aspects of string theory, with focus on D-instantons which play key roles in the context of string phenomenology and dualities. By translating ideas…
We present a new method for sampling rare and large fluctuations in a non-equilibrium system governed by a stochastic partial differential equation (SPDE) with additive forcing. To this end, we deploy the so-called instanton formalism that…