Lectures on the mass of topological solitons

Abstract

In this series of lectures a method is developed to compute one-loop shifts to classical masses of kinks, multi-component kinks, and self-dual vortices. Canonical quantization is used to show that the mass shift induced by one-loop quantum fluctuations is the trace of the square root of the differential operator governing these fluctuations. Standard mathematical techniques are used to deal with some powers of pseudo-differential operators. Ultraviolet divergences are tamed by using generalized zeta function regularization methods and, then performing zero-point energy and mass renormalizations.

99 pages. Lecture notes on three two-hour lectures given by JMG during the third week of July 2005 in the Department of Physics of the Universidade Federal de Paraiba (Joao Pessoa, Brazil)

Cited by in corpus (4)

• One loop corrections to the mass of self-dual semi-local planar topological solitons
• Quantum corrections to the noncommutative kink
• One-loop fluctuations of semi-local self-dual vortices
• Quantum scalar fields in the half-line. A heat kernel/zeta function approach