# Tag Info

## Hot answers tagged field-theory

52

I'm going to go with a programmer metaphor for you. The mathematics (including "A field is a function that returns a value for a point in space") are the interface: they define for you exactly what you can expect from this object. The "what is it, really, when you get right down to it" is the implementation. Formally you don't care how it is implemented. ...

17

You say: she said to me that, if I wanted hardcore definitions, a field is a function that returns a value for a point in space. Now this finally makes a hell lot of sense to me but I still don't understand how mathematical functions can be a part of the Universe and shape the reality. You don't have to use super-complicated examples ...

16

The main distinction you want to make is between the Green function and the kernel. (I prefer the terminology "Green function" without the 's. Imagine a different name, say, Feynman. People would definitely say the Feynman function, not the Feynman's function. But I digress...) Start with a differential operator, call it $L$. E.g., in the case of ...

15

The higher the number of derivatives the more initial data you have to provide. If you have some Lagrangian that contains an infinite number of derivatives (or derivatives appearing non-polynomially, such as one over derivative) then you have to provide an infinite amount of initial data which amounts to non-local info, in the sense explained below. If you ...

15

1) yes, it basically will find a non-optimal solution. At every point, the top of the ray looks for the bigger potential gradient, the charge in the surrounding volume grows, polarizing surrounding material (air, in this case) until a bigger gradient shows up and the ray continues over that direction. This is why the lightining path looks like a jigsaw; its ...

13

A field theory is a physical description of reality in which the fundamental entities are fields, i.e. objects having no definite spatial location but a certain value or intensity at each place. Examples of fields are the temperature in a room, for each location in the room, a temperature can be specified, although in most cases temperature will be pretty ...

12

Update to address new questions. The answer to this question is no. At least if you take the question purely formally. Only theories such as classical field theory, quantum field theory and continuum mechanics are field theories (you generally recognize them by having continuous degrees of freedom; also they usually have the word field in the title :-)). ...

12

First of all, it's not true that all important differential equations in physics are second-order. The Dirac equation is first-order. The number of derivatives in the equations is equal to the number of derivatives in the corresponding relevant term of the Lagrangian. These kinetic terms have the form $${\mathcal L}_{\rm Dirac} = \bar \Psi \gamma^\mu ... 9 Whether your current j^\mu is conserved off-shell depends on your definition of j^\mu. If you define it via the Dirac and other charged fields, it will only be conserved assuming the equations of motion. However, if you define j^\mu via$$ j^\mu = \partial^\nu F_{\mu\nu},  i.e. as a function of the electromagnetic field and its derivatives, then ...

9

In general, boundary conditons must be adapted to the real situation. Zero boundary conditions are just for the sake of simplicity. But they are realistic only when the field is really zero for some definite reason. If the boundary is at infinity, zero boundary conditions means that everything of interest happens in a finite domain and cannot be noticed ...

8

Just because $F^{\mu\nu}$ has two indices does not mean that it represents a spin-2 particle. Note that the metric $g^{\mu\nu}$ is a symmetric two indexed object while the EM field strength $F^{\mu\nu}$ is antisymmetric. In fact, the metric $g^{\mu\nu}$ is analogous to potential $A^\mu$ in EM and the field strength of gravity is the four indexed Riemann ...

8

Clearly, an interaction involving $\phi(x+h)$ deserved to be called nonlocal. But since $\phi(x+h)=\sum_{k=0}^\infty \phi^{(k)}(x) h^k/k!$, any nonlocal interaction can be expressed as a power series involving arbitrarily many derivatives. Therefore an action (or Lagrangian) is called nonlocal if it involves infinitely many derivatives. If there are only ...

7

Disillusionment with systems described by higher order Lagrangians harks back to a 1950 paper by Pais and Uhlenbeck, in which they showed that such systems were prone to pathologies, including states with negative energy and states with negative norm. There's a more recent discussion of this in arXiv:hep-th/0408104.

7

This looks a lot like soap film statics, but with an extra dimension. Consider a soap film glued to a ring. The film is described by a function $z = \phi(x,y)$, with $z$ the height of the film above the xy-plane. We want to minimise the potential energy of the film, which means to a good approximation minimising the surface area. The total area of the film ...

7

One can rewrite any pde of any order as a system of first order pde's, hence the assumption behind question is somewhat questionable. Also there exist first order PDE's of relevance to physics (Dirac equation, Burgers equation, to name just two). However, it is common that quantities in physics appear in conjugate pairs of potential fields and their ...

7

As Lubos Motl and twistor59 explain, a necessary condition for unitarity is that the Yang Mills (YM) gauge group $G$ with corresponding Lie algebra $g$ should be real and have a positive (semi)definite associative/invariant bilinear form $\kappa: g\times g \to \mathbb{R}$, cf. the kinetic part of the Yang Mills action. The bilinear form $\kappa$ is often ...

7

The trick is given in equation 4.4 of the attached article: First couple the theory to gravity, (by introducing a metric tensor in the integration measure and for each index raising) obtaining the action: $S = \int_M d^4x \sqrt{-g} \mathcal{L}$ Then vary the action with respect to the metric tensor: $T_{\alpha\beta} = \frac{1}{\sqrt{-g}} \frac{\delta ... 7 Conformal field theories do not have a mass-gap, which is one of the assumptions [for the strong conclusions of non-mixing of Poincare spacetime symmetries vs internal symmetries] of the Coleman-Mandula no-go theorem. Similarly, for its superversion: the Haag-Lopuszanski-Sohnius no-go theorem. [In the supercase, the Poincare algebra is replaced with the ... 6 The earliest instance I have found is Minkowski's "Die Grundgleichungen für die elektromagnetischen Vorgänge in bewegten Körpern" in "Nachrichten von der Georg-Augusts-Universität und der Königl. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen" from 1908. A digitized version is found at ... 6 Wigner always complained about people who used the word « invariant » (this was, of course, in the context of Special Relativity): he said one should say that the principle of relativity requires « covariance,» not invariance. Einstein's own papers on GR tend to carry out Wigner's request: the theory of GR (which is more general than Einstein's theory of ... 6 You certainly couldn't recover quantum effects with a classical treatment of that Lagrangian. If you wanted to recover quantum mechanics from the field Lagrangian you've written, you could either restrict your focus to the single particle sector of Fock space or consider a worldline treatment. To read more about the latter, look up Siegel's online QFT book ... 6 Fields are the fundamental objects, and observable particles are their irreducible excitations. The particle content of a field theory can be inferred only from closer analysis. The bare particles which go into the description of the Feynman diagrams (and must already be renormalized to even make sense) only tell part of the story. In the sense of an ... 6 No, the statement is false even in the electric case. At the very beginning, the acceleration is$\vec a \sim \vec E$so they have the same direction at$t=0$: the tangents agree. However, as soon as the particle reaches some nonzero velocity$\vec v \neq 0$, its acceleration is still$\vec a\sim \vec E$, in the direction of the field lines, however its ... 6 The classical reference is Landau & Lifshitz, The Classical Theory of Fields, from the Course of Theoretical Physics. As all Landau & Lifshitz books, masterpieces [in my opinion] full of content but sometimes a little difficult to grasp for beginners. 6 There is indeed a scalar field model of gravity, in fact Einstein originally tried that before settling on a spin 2 description. Scalar gravity is called Einstein-Nordstrom gravity, here is a link to wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordstr%C3%B6m%27s_theory_of_gravitation. At the nonlinear level it amounts to using$R$in Einsteins equations instead ... 6 Let's compare classical mechanics and GR to attempt to get at the intuition you're looking for. Classical mechanics. Recall that in the classical mechanics of a system of$N$particles, the configuration of the system at every point in time is represented by a point$x\in\mathbb R^{3N}$. The configuration manifold$\mathcal Q\$, namely the set of possible ...

5

From the way fields are actually used in physics and engineering, and consistent with the mathematical definition, fields are properties of any extended part of the universe with well-defined spatial boundaries. (The latter may be missing in case of infinitely extended objects, e.g., the universe as a whole - if it is infinitely extended.) Causality is ...

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