Construction of Feynman diagrams for group field theory

Tuesday, Dec 5th

Marco Finocchiaro, Albert Einstein Institute
Title: Recursive graphical construction of GFT Feynman diagrams 
PDF of the talk (1M)
Audio+Slides [.mp4 24MB]

By Jorge Pullin, LSU.
A common technique for computing probability amplitudes in quantum field theory consists in expanding such objects as power series in term of the coupling constant of the theory. Each term in the expansion, usually involving complicated expressions, can be represented in a pictorial way by using diagrams. This graphical technique (known as "Feynman diagrams method") allows to write down and organize the terms in the perturbative series in a much easier way.

Group field theories (GFTs) are ordinary quantum field theories on group manifolds. Their Feynman amplitudes (i.e. amplitudes associated to Feynman graphs) correspond by construction to Quantum Gravity Spinfoam amplitudes. There exists an analogue situation in 1+1 dimensional theories known as matrix models, which are quantum field theories whose Feynman diagrams are related to the path integrals for gravity in 1+1 dimensions. From this point of view group field theories can be seen as a four dimensional generalization of matrix models.

The seminar, articulated in three parts, dealt with several aspects concerning the construction of GFT's Feynman diagrams and the evaluation of the corresponding amplitudes. In the first part a general introduction to group field theory was provided, stressing the importance of studying the divergences appearing in the amplitudes' computations. Indeed they can be used as tools to constraint and test the type of theories that can be built. In the second part the main methods to extract the amplitudes' divergences were briefly reviewed. Moreover a new GFT/Spinfoam model for Euclidean quantum gravity was presented. The last part was devoted to the seminar's main topic, namely the generation of Feynman graphs in group field theory. Beyond the leading order in the power series expansion this is often a difficult task. It was shown how to construct GFT's Feynman diagrams using recursive graphical relations that are suitable for implementations in computers. Future works will deal with making the computations parallelizable.