2. Field theory formulation
For a scalar field, , with spacial degrees of freedom and canonical momentum , the classical affine variables are and . The reason we insist that is because if then whatever is .
We then introduce the classical Hamiltonian expressed in affine variables. This leads us to
where
r is a positive, even, integer and
is the bare coupling constant such that for
we fall into the free field theory. With these variables we do not let
otherwise
which is not fair to
and, as we already observed, we must forbid also
which would admit
giving again an undetermined kinetic term. Therefore the AQ bounds
forbid any nonrenormalizability [
12,
13,
14,
15,
16,
17,
18,
19,
20,
21,
22] which is otherwise possible for CQ [
2,
3,
4,
5].
The quantum affine operators are the scalar field
and the
dilation operator
where the momentum operator is
. Accordingly for the self adjoint kinetic term
(note that the factor
that holds for
should be replaced by a factor 2 if
[
17]) and one finds for the quantum Hamiltonian operator
The affine action is found adding time,
, where
c is the speed of light constant and
t is the Euclidean imaginary time, so that
, with
H the semi-classical Hamiltonian corresponding to the one of Eq. (
2), will then read
where with an abuse of notation we here use
x for
and
, with
the Boltzmann’s constant and
T the absolute temperature. In this work we will set
.
The vacuum expectation value of an observable
will then be given by the following expression
where the functional integrals will be calculated on a lattice using the PIMC method as explained later on.
The theory considers a real scalar field
taking the value
on each site
x of a periodic
n-dimensional lattice, with
space-time dimensions, of lattice spacing
a, the ultraviolet cutoff, spacial periodicity
and temporal periodicity
. The field path is a closed loop on an
n-dimensional closed surface of an
-dimensional
-periodic cylinder of radius
L: an
-dimensional torus. We used a lattice formulation of the AQ field theory of Eq. (
3) (also studied in Eq. (8) of [
12]) using additionally the scaling
and
which is necessary to eliminate the Dirac delta factor
divergent in the continuum limit
. The affine action for the field (in the
primitive approximation [
23]) is then approximated by
where
is a vector of length
a in the
direction with
. We will have
.
In this work we are interested in reaching the continuum limit by taking fixed and letting at fixed volume .
We performed a PIMC [
23,
24,
25,
26] calculation for the AQ field theory described by the action of Eq. (
5) in natural Planck units
. Specifically we studied the
and
case. We calculated the renormalized coupling constant
and mass
defined in Eqs. (11) and (13) of [
12] respectively, measuring them in the PIMC through vacuum expectation values like in Eq. (
4). In particular
and
, where
is the Fourier transform of the field and we choose the 4-momentum
with one spacial component equal to
and all other components equal to zero. We also calulated the one-, two-point-, and two-point-connected-function, respectively given by
By construction, these are periodic functions,
, of period
L. Moreover, since the action
contains only even powers of the field these functions must be symmetric respect to
, namely
.
3. The scaling
As we have seen we decided to work with a scaled field
, related to the variable
, used for example in [
12], by
In other words, we are renormalizing the bare field. This can be compared with the standard renormalization formula
is referred to as the renormalized field and
Z is called the renormalization constant. In this language, we are setting
.
At the same time, we are rescaling the coupling constant with
In the Standard Model, the various coupling constants also need to be renormalized for the continuum limit to exist, but the renormalization is not simply given by a power of the lattice spacing. Instead, it needs to carefully be tuned to the cutoff and to the couplings. In perturbation theory of canonical
, the bare coupling constant can be expressed in terms of the renormalized one, order by order. The result consists of a series that starts with
:
The standard renormalization procedure is based on the fact that the Fourier transform of the renormalized two-point-function contains a pole at
, where
M is the physical mass of the particle. The renormalization constant
Z is chosen such that the residue of this pole is equal to 1. This ensures, in particular, that
and
as well as
and
g have the same dimension. Note that our rescaling (
9) and (
11) instead changes the dimension of these objects.
We will soon see, in our first case study below, that the expectation value
tends to a constant when
N becomes large. This means that the expectation value of the unscaled field,
, tends to infinity in proportion to
[
12,
14].
As we are holding constant, the unscaled coupling constant g tends to zero in proportion to . This suggests that, for the parameter values we consider, the connected Green’s functions of the unscaled model tend to those of a free scalar field.
4. Numerical results
Our PIMC simulations use the Metropolis algorithm [
24,
25] to calculate the ensemble average of Eq. (
4) which is a
multidimensional integral. The simulation is started from the initial condition
for all lattice points
x, with
a small positive number. One PIMC step consisted in a random displacement of each one of the
field values,
, as follows
where
is a uniform pseudo random number in
and
is the amplitude of the displacement. Each one of these
moves is accepted if
where
is the change in the action due to the move (it can be efficiently calculated considering how the kinetic part and the potential part change by the displacement of a single
) and rejected otherwise. The amplitude
is chosen in such a way to have acceptance ratios as close as possible to
and is kept constant during the evolution of the simulation. One simulation consisted of
M PIMC steps. The statistical error on the average
will then depend on the correlation time necessary to decorrelate the property
,
, and will be determined as
, where
is the intrinsic variance for
.
We used up to a lattice of points () and up to corresponding to PIMC displacement moves.
4.1. First case study
In our simulation we first chose the following study case and .
Notice that the minima of the two symmetric potential wells in the semi-classical Hamiltonian density described by the function
, are at
. From our Monte Carlo simulations (see
Teble 1), it seems that the vacuum expectation value of the field (one-point-value),
, tends to these values in the continuum limit,
. Note that in some of our previous works [
16,
18,
19] where, instead of keeping the bare mass
m constant, we tuned it so to have a constant renormalized mass
we found
in all cases. This is due to the fact that as
N increases so does the necessary bare mass which keeps constant
. So that the two symmetric potential wells in the semi-classical Hamiltonian density has minima that tends to zero and one experiences tunneling of the potential barrier at
.
In
Table 2 we show the values for the renormalized mass,
, and coupling constant
at increasing values of
. We see that in the continuum limit
and
, meaning that
In
Figure 1 we show
at increasing values of
. From the plot of the simulation data we see that the function is symmetric respect to
as expected, since the action only contains even powers of the field.
In
Figure 2 we show
at increasing values of
. From the plot of the simulation data we see that
. The width of the spike of
at
seems to be related to the value of the renormalized mass
.
Alternatively we could have adjusted, at each change of
N, the value of the bare mass
m so to have a fixed value for the renormalized mass
. This would have resulted in a convergence towards a unique two-point-connected-function in the continuum limit
. We did not choose did strategy because it is numerically problematic to tune the bare mass so to have at each
N the same value for the renormalized mass. This was what we did in some of our previous papers [
12,
13,
16,
17,
18,
19,
20,
21,
22].
4.2. Second case study
For the parameter values we just used, the box plays a crucial role: the bare Compton wavelength (
) is equal to the size
L of the box. In order for the box to be a purely technical device introduced to regularize the theory, it must be large compared to the correlation length of the model. At the same time, the lattice spacing must be small compared to it:
Therefore, next we considered the study case with , and , which should be much less affected by the presence of the box than the previous choice .
Table 2.
Renormalized mass
, renormalized coupling constant
, and one-point-value (vacuum expectation value of the field)
for
,
,
and
. In our PIMC simulations we used Eqs. (
4) and (
5).
Table 2.
Renormalized mass
, renormalized coupling constant
, and one-point-value (vacuum expectation value of the field)
for
,
,
and
. In our PIMC simulations we used Eqs. (
4) and (
5).
N |
|
|
V |
4 |
0.1461(2) |
2.01199(2) |
0.6672(4) |
7 |
0.0627(1) |
2.001154(4) |
0.5992(3) |
13 |
0.02463(5) |
1.999844(2) |
0.5169(2) |
25 |
0.00867(5) |
2.000069(7) |
0.4359(3) |
Notice that the minima of the two symmetric potential wells in the semi-classical Hamiltonian density described by the function
,
, are such that
So with our choice of
we will find, in the continuum limit,
in agreement with the results in Refs. [
12,
13,
16,
18,
19,
20,
21,
22].
From
Figure 3 we see the continuum limit
, of the scaled two-point-connected-function where, with an abuse of notation, we dropped from
, the prime, adopted rigorously in
Section 3. Respect to the work [
14] (see Fig. 3 there) which dealt with the unscaled free field case and
was found to increase with increasing
N we see how now the scaling has the effect of letting the value of
decrease with increasing
N, as shown in
Figure 3, since
and
. It is only tuning the bare mass
m so to have a constant renormalized mass
for each
N, that we would find true convergence. Unfortunately this procedure is not easily accomplished numerically since for each
N we would have to make several test runs with different values of
m in order to find the value which keeps
approximately constant. This procedure was nonetheless carried out in the following works [
12,
13,
16,
18,
19,
20,
21,
22].
5. Conclusions
In this paper, we represent by . To insure proper values for it is necessary to restrict as well as . Indeed such symbol change is able to treat Hamiltonian densities with an interaction . This leads to a completely satisfactory quantization of field theories using situations that involve scaled behavior leading to an unexpected, which arises only in the quantum aspects. Indeed, it is fair to claim that this symbol change leads to valid field theory quantizations.
Respect to the work [
14] which dealt with the free field case we here repeat that analysis but now for the
interacting case.
We prove through path integral Monte Carlo computer experiments that the affine quantization of the scaled Euclidean covariant relativistic field theory is a well defined quantum field theory with a well defined continuum limit of the one- and two-point-function, the Green’s function.
The simple pseudo-potential
stemming from the affine quantization procedure [
9] not only does not disturb the continuum limit, as we proved here, but in addition is able to render renormalizable the
theory which is known [
2] to be non-renormalizable when treated with the more commonly known [
1] canonical quantization.