Quantum Field Theory Seminar

Henry Liu, Department of Pure Mathematics, University of Waterloo

“Renormalization Theory (Part 1)”

Quantum field theory is notorious for its divergences and infinities. These divergences arise because we are mathematicians: when we take into account the underlying physics, we will discover that the divergences magically cancel. One example of this that I will discuss is zeta regularization in the context of the Casimir effect, which is where all the silliness with 1 + 2 + = -1/12 comes from. This will motivate an algorithm known as dimensional regularization, which we will apply to our naive phi4 theory to systematically rid it of its divergences.

MC 5403