Related papers: Worldline Instantons II: The Fluctuation Prefactor
A semiclassical cosmological model is considered which consists of a closed Friedmann-Robertson-Walker in the presence of a cosmological constant, which mimics the effect of an inflaton field, and a massless, non-conformally coupled quantum…
We review recent theoretical results from our systematic study of QCD-instanton contributions to eP processes, involving a hard momentum scale Q. The main issues are: the absence of IR divergencies due to a dynamical suppression of…
The effective electroweak Hamiltonian in the gradient-flow formalism is constructed for the current-current operators through next-to-next-to-leading order QCD. The results are presented for two common choices of the operator basis. This…
We prove formulas for the multi-instanton corrections to the overlap and energies of a 1D same-level asymmetric double well using the Euclidean path integral. Both the odd and even instanton sectors are summed to all orders. The double well…
We apply the resolvent technique to the computation of the QED effective action in time dependent electric field backgrounds. The effective action has both real and imaginary parts, and the imaginary part is related to the pair production…
The QED effective Lagrangian in the presence of an arbitrary constant electromagnetic background field at finite temperature is derived in the imaginary-time formalism to one-loop order. The boundary conditions in imaginary time reduce the…
This paper presents a simple model that mimics quantum mechanics (QM) results in terms of probability fields of free particles subject to self-interference, without using Schroedinger equation or complex wavefunctions. Unlike the standard…
We obtain effective equations of inflationary dynamics for the mean inflaton and metric fields in the no-boundary and tunneling quantum states of the Universe. In the slow roll approximation (taking the form of the local Schwiger-DeWitt…
For one dimensional non-relativistic quantum mechanical problems, we investigate the conditions for all the position dependence of the propagator to be in its phase, that is, the semi-classical approximation to be exact. For velocity…
The Wheeler-DeWitt equation provides the probability distribution for the curvature perturbation, the gauge invariant quantum fluctuation of the inflaton. From this, we can find a tower of power spectra which is not found in a perturbative…
In this talk, we compare two states: the stationary state in stochastic inflation and the ground state wave function of the universe. We already know that, for the potential with a static field, two pictures give the same probability…
Inflationary quantum gravity simplifies drastically in the leading logarithm approximation. We show that the only counterterm which contributes in this limit is the 1-loop renormalization of the cosmological constant. We go further to make…
Perturbative quantum field theory usually uses second quantisation and Feynman diagrams. The worldline formalism provides an alternative approach based on first quantised particle path integrals, similar in spirit to string perturbation…
Inflation is most often described using quantum field theory (QFT) on a fixed, curved spacetime background. Such a description is valid only if the spatial volume of the region considered is so large that its size and shape moduli behave…
We study the formation of gravitating global strings through quantum mechanical tunneling. The instantons that describe the nucleation process are characterized by two parameters: the string core thickness and its gravitational backreaction…
Taking into account the effect of self-interaction, the dynamics of the quantum fluctuations of the inflaton field with $\lambda\phi^4$ potential is studied in detail. We find that the self interaction efficiently drives the initial pure…
Path integral implementation of the quantum instanton approximation currently belongs among the most accurate methods for computing quantum rate constants and kinetic isotope effects, but its use has been limited due to the rather high…
We compute the primordial scalar, vector and tensor metric perturbations arising from quantum field inflation. Quantum field inflation takes into account the nonperturbative quantum dynamics of the inflaton consistently coupled to the…
We study the effective interactions of external electromagnetic fields induced by fluctuations of virtual particles in the vacuum of quantum electrodynamics. Our main focus is on these interactions at two-loop order. We discuss in detail…
We present a quantum M2 brane computation of the instanton prefactor in the leading non-perturbative contribution to the ABJM 3-sphere free energy at large $N$ and fixed level $k$. Using supersymmetric localization, such instanton…