Related papers: Worldline Instantons II: The Fluctuation Prefactor
We revisit the fundamentals of two different methods for calculating classical observables: the eikonal method, which is a scattering amplitude-based method, and the worldline quantum field theory (WQFT) method. The latter has been…
Driven-dissipative nonlinear systems exhibit rich critical behavior, related to bifurcation, bistability and switching, which underlie key phenomena in areas ranging from physics, chemistry and biology to social sciences and economics. The…
Infinite entanglement fluctuations appear when a quantum field theory on a causally complete domain of space-time is a type $III$ factor. In the weak gravity limit $G_N=0$ this factor can be transformed into a crossed product type $II$…
Simultaneously with inventing the modern relativistic formalism of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman presented also a first-quantized representation of QED in terms of worldline path integrals. Although this alternative formulation has been…
Studying the instanton-induced contributions to various hard exclusive reactions provides physical insight into the transition from the non-perturbative to the perturbative regime of QCD. To this end, we study the leading-instanton…
We calculate the electromagnetic pion form factor at intermediate space-like momentum transfer from the QCD sum rule for the correlation function of two {\it pseudoscalar } interpolating fields and the electromagnetic current. This…
We demonstrate the feasibility of a nonperturbative analysis of quantum field theory in the worldline formalism with the help of an efficient numerical algorithm. In particular, we compute the effective action for a super-renormalizable…
While there does not at this time exist a complete canonical theory of full 3+1 quantum gravity, there does appear to be a satisfactory canonical quantization of minisuperspace models. The method requires no `choice of time variable' and…
We consider in detail the quantum-mechanical problem associated with the motion of a one-dimensional particle under the action of the double-well potential. Our main tool will be the euclidean (imaginary time) version of the path-integral…
In this paper, working in the eikonal approximation, we present a proof for the exponentiation of the 2-body eikonal phase to {\it all orders in the eikonal expansion}, for scalar particles interacting electromagnetically or…
We show how to use the worldline-instanton formalism to calculate the momentum spectrum of the electron-positron pairs produced by an electric field that depends on both space and time. Using the LSZ reduction formula with a worldline…
We show that two elementary worldline path integrals-the thermal partition function of the harmonic oscillator and the one-loop effective action of scalar QED in a constant field strength-exhibit a natural form of supersymmetric…
We propose a mechanism for the enhancement of vacuum fluctuations by means of a classical field. The basic idea is that if an observable quantity depends quadratically upon a quantum field, such as the electric field, then the application…
We consider the decay of a false vacuum in circumstances where the methods suggested by Coleman run into difficulties. We find that in these cases quantum fluctuations play a crucial role. Namely, they naturally induce both an ultraviolet…
Worldline instantons have previously been used to study the probability of Schwinger pair production (both the exponential and pre-exponential parts) and photon-stimulated pair production (the exponential part). Previous studies obtained…
We identify a new class of UV-complete instanton solutions that describe the false vacuum\- decay of a real scalar field in a particular curved spacetime background. To this end, we consider a simple scalar theory with a Coleman potential…
We perform a precise analytic test of the instanton approximation by comparing the exact band spectrum of the periodic Lam\'e potential to the tight-binding, instanton and WKB approximations. The instanton result gives the correct leading…
We consider specific quantum mechanical model problems for which perturbation theory fails to explain physical properties like the eigenvalue spectrum even qualitatively, even if the asymptotic perturbation series is augmented by…
We consider the quantum tunneling phenomenon in a well-behaved triple-well potential. As required by the semiclassical approximation we take into account the quadratic fluctuations over the instanton which represents as usual the localised…
We propose a numerical technique for calculating effective actions of electromagnetic backgrounds based on the worldline formalism. As a conceptually simple example, we consider scalar electrodynamics in three dimensions to one-loop order.…