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