Worldline formalism for a confined scalar field

OLINDO CORRADINI; JAMES P. EDWARDS; IDRISH HUET; LUCAS MANZO; PABLO PISANI

JOURNAL OF HIGH ENERGY PHYSICS - (Online)

Springer

Año: 2019

1029-8479

The worldline formalism is a useful scheme in quantum field theory which has also become a powerful tool for numerical computations. The key ingredient in this formalism is the first quantization of an auxiliary point-particle whose transition amplitudes correspond to the heat-kernel of the operator of quantum fluctuations of the field theory. However, to study a quantum field which is confined within some boundaries one needs to restrict the path integration domain of the auxiliary point-particle to a specific subset of worldlines enclosed by those boundaries. We show how to implement this restriction for the case of a scalar field confined to the $D$-dimensional ball under Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions, and compute the first few heat-kernel coefficients as a verification of our construction. We argue that this approach could admit different generalizations.