arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Michael C. Birse.
I outline why the renormalisation group is needed to analyse the scale dependence and hence determine the power counting for effective theories of strongly interacting systems. I summarise the results of several such analyses for two- and three-body forces in nuclear physics. These show that a number of terms should be significantly promoted relative to naive dimensional analysis.
The low-energy scattering of two charged particles is analyzed using a renormalization group approach based on dimensional regularization with power-divergence subtraction. A nontrivial solution with a marginally unstable direction is found, corresponding to a system with a bound state at zero energy. For purely energy-dependent perturbations around this solution, the power counting agrees with that from Wilsonian methods. These terms in the effective potential are in direct correspondence with the the terms in the Coulomb-distorted effective-range expansion. We also study perturbations that depend on off-shell momenta as well as energy, and we show that these affect only the off-shell form of the scattering matrix. These terms are of higher order that the corresponding energy-dependent ones and so terms in the potential that depend only on the off-shell momenta do not have definite orders in power counting.
The functional renormalisation group is applied to the effective action for scattering of two nonrelativistic fermions. The resulting physical effective action is shown to contain the correct threshold singularity. The corresponding "bare" action respects Galilean invariance up to second order in momenta. Beyond that order it contains terms that violate this symmetry and, for the particular regulator considered, nonanalytic third-order terms. The corresponding potential can be expanded around a nontrivial fixed point using the power counting appropriate to a system with large scattering length.
This lecture provides an introduction to the renormalisation group as applied to scattering of two nonrelativistic particles. As well as forming a framework for constructing effective theories of few-nucleon systems, these ideas also provide a simple example which illustrates general features of the renormalisation group.
Nucleon-nucleon scattering in spin-triplet channels is analysed within an effective field theory where one-pion exchange is treated nonperturbatively. Justifying this requires the identification of an additional low-energy scale in the strength of that potential. Short-range interactions are organised according to the resulting power counting, in which the leading term is promoted to significantly lower order than in the usual perturbative counting. In each channel there is a critical momentum above which the waves probe the singular core of the tensor potential and the new counting is necessary. When the effects of one- and two-pion exchange have been removed using a distorted-wave Born approximation, the residual scattering in waves with L<=2 is well described by the first three terms in the new counting. In contrast, the scattering in waves with L>=3 is consistent with the perturbative counting, at least for energies up to 300 MeV. This pattern is in agreement with estimates of the critical momenta in these channels.
A number of papers recently have used fourth-order chiral perturbation theory to extrapolate lattice data for the nucleon mass; the process seems surprisingly successful even for large pion masses. This paper shows that the inclusion of the fifth-order terms spoils the agreement.
Techniques developed for handing inverse-power-law potentials in atomic physics are applied to the tensor one-pion exchange potential to determine the regions in which it can be treated perturbatively. In S-, P- and D-waves the critical values of the relative momentum are less than or of the order of 400 MeV. The RG is then used to determine the power counting for short-range interaction in the presence of this potential. In the P-and D-waves, where there are no low-energy bound or virtual states, these interactions have half-integer RG eigenvalues and are substantially promoted relative to naive expectations. These results are independent of whether the tensor force is attractive or repulsive. In the 3S1 channel the leading term is relevant, but it is demoted by half an order compared to the counting for the effective-range expansion with only a short-range potential. The tensor force can be treated perturbatively in those F-waves and above that do not couple to P- or D-waves. The corresponding power counting is the usual one given by naive dimensional analysis.
A coordinate space approach, based on that used by Efimov, is applied to three-body systems with contact interactions between pairs of particles. In systems with nonzero orbital angular momentum or with asymmetric spatial wave functions, the hyperradial equation contains a repulsive 1/r^2 potential. The resulting wave functions are used in a renormalisation group analysis. This confirms Griesshammer's power counting for short-range three-body forces in these systems. The only exceptions are ones like the 4S channel for three nucleons, where any derivatives needed in the interaction are found to be already counted by the scaling with the cut-off.
The soft-pion theorem for pion production in deeply virtual Compton scattering, derived by Guichon, Mosse and Vanderhaegen, is shown to be consistent with chiral perturbation theory. Chiral symmetry requires that the nonsinglet operators corresponding to spin-independent and spin-dependent parton distributions have the same anomalous dimensions in cases where those operators are related by chiral transformations. In chiral perturbation theory, their scale-dependences can thus be absorbed in the coefficents of the corresponding effective operators, without affecting their chiral structures.
Peripheral nucleon-nucleon scattering is analysed in the framework of an effective field theory. Distorted-wave methods are used to remove the effects of one-pion exchange. Two-pion exchange and recoil corrections to one-pion exchange are then subtracted pertubatively. This removes all contributions up to order Q^3 in the chiral expansion. We have applied this to the 1D2, 1F3 and 1G4 waves, using phase shifts from various partial-wave analyses by the Nijmegen group. In regions where these analyses agree we find no evidence for a breakdown of the chiral expansion. One of the terms in the effective short-range potential, the leading one in the 1D2 channel, is larger might be expected, but in general these terms have momentum scales of about 300-400 MeV. We also see hints of isospin breaking in the pi-N couplings.
We study the nucleon and diquarks in a non-local Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model. For certain parameters the model exhibits quark confinement, in the form of a propagator without real poles. After truncation of the two-body channels to the scalar and axial-vector diquarks, a relativistic Faddeev equation for nucleon bound states is solved in the covariant diquark-quark picture. The dependence of the nucleon mass on diquark masses is studied in detail. We find parameters that lead to a simultaneous reasonable description of pions and nucleons. Both the diquarks contribute attractively to the nucleon mass. Axial-vector diquark correlations are seen to be important, especially in the confining phase of the model. We study the possible implications of quark confinement for the description of the diquarks and the nucleon. In particular, we find that it leads to a more compact nucleon.
We study the application of the exact renormalisation group to a many-fermion system with a short-range attractive force. We introduce a boson field to describe pairing effects, and take a simple ansatz for the effective action. We derive a set of approximate flow equations for the effective coupling including boson and fermionic fluctuations. The initial conditions are obtained by renormalising the interaction to fit the scattering length in vacuum. At some critical value of the running scale, the numerical solutions show a phase transition to a gapped phase. Standard results are recovered if we omit the boson loops. When boson fluctuations are included, we find that their contributions are significant only in the small-gap regime.
A distorted-wave version of the renormalisation group is applied to scattering by an inverse-square potential and to three-body systems. In attractive three-body systems, the short-distance wave function satisfies a Schroedinger equation with an attractive inverse-square potential, as shown by Efimov. The resulting oscillatory behaviour controls the renormalisation of the three-body interactions, with the renormalisation-group flow tending to a limit cycle as the cut-off is lowered. The approach used here leads to single-valued potentials with discontinuities as the bound states are cut off. The perturbations around the cycle start with a marginal term whose effect is simply to change the phase of the short-distance oscillations, or the self-adjoint extension of the singular Hamiltonian. The full power counting in terms of the energy and two-body scattering length is constructed for short-range three-body forces.
The diquark and nucleon are studied in a non-local NJL model. We solve the relativistic Faddeev equation and compare the results with the ordinary NJL model. Although the model is quark confining, it is not diquark confining in the rainbow-ladder approximation. We show that the off-shell contribution to the diquark $T$ matrix is crucial for the structure of the nucleon: without its inclusion the attraction in the scalar channel is too weak to form a three-body bound state.
We use a transport-theory approach to construct the static propagator of a gauge boson in a plasma with a general axially- and reflection-symmetric momentum distribution. Non-zero magnetic screening is found if the distribution is anisotropic, confirming the results of a closed-time-path-integral approach. We find that the electric and magnetic screening effects depend on both the orientation of the momentum carried by the boson and the orientation of its polarization. In some orientations there can be antiscreening, reflecting the instabilities of such a medium. We present some fairly general conditions on the dependence of these effects on the anisotropy.
Effective field theory requires all observables to be independent of the representation used for the quantum field operators. It means that off-shell properties of the interactions should not lead to any observable effects. We analyse this issue in the context of many-body approaches to nuclear matter, where it should be possible to shift the contributions of lowest order in purely off-shell two-body interactions into three-body forces. We show that none of the commonly used truncations of the two-body scattering amplitude such as the ladder, Brueckner-Hartree-Fock or parquet approximations respect this requirement.
We present a method for constructing the complete set of meson-exchange corrections to baryon observables described by covariant chiral quark models. The meson corrections are expressed in terms of an unperturbed valence-quark Green's function. This method is illustrated for the case of an NJL model. It also enables us to discuss, in terms of approximations used for this unperturbed Green's function, the treatments of meson corrections in two other chiral quark models.
We apply renormalisation-group methods to two-body scattering by a combination of known long-range and unknown short-range potentials. We impose a cut-off in the basis of distorted waves of the long-range potential and identify possible fixed points of the short-range potential as this cut-off is lowered to zero. The expansions around these fixed points define the power countings for the corresponding effective field theories. Expansions around nontrivial fixed points are shown to correspond to distorted-wave versions of the effective-range expansion. These methods are applied to scattering in the presence of Coulomb, Yukawa and repulsive inverse-square potentials.