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Lucas Manzo

Publications and source records attributed to Lucas Manzo.

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Worldline Images for Yang-Mills Theory within Boundaries

In this article we develop a worldline technique based on the method of images to study the effective action associated to Yang-Mills theories on manifolds with boundaries. We consider the possibility of having either relative or absolute boundary conditions, which are particular types of mixed boundary conditions. Both vector fields and ghost fields are taken into account in this analysis. As a check of our construction, we compute the first three Seeley-DeWitt coefficients of the heat kernel asymptotics. Finally, we employ our technique to calculate the rate of gluon production due to a chromoelectric field background in the presence of a boundary.

hep-th

Worldline approach for spinor fields in manifolds with boundaries

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.

hep-th

Worldline formalism for a confined scalar field

The worldline formalism is a useful scheme in quantum field theory which has also become a powerful tool for numerical computations. The key ingredient in this formalism is the first quantization of an auxiliary 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 which is confined within some boundaries one needs to restrict the path integration domain of the auxiliary point-particle to a specific subset of worldlines enclosed by those boundaries. We show how to implement this restriction for the case of a scalar field confined to the $D$-dimensional ball under Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions, and compute the first few heat-kernel coefficients as a verification of our construction. We argue that this approach could admit different generalizations.

hep-th