9.3k citations · 14.5k across the 21 of their papers we have counts for
21 papers
Kronecker anomalies and gravitational striction
Alexander M. Polyakov, Fedor K. Popov
We study quantum field theories in which the number of degrees of freedom changes discontinuously across the momentum space. This discontinuity which we call "Kronecker anomaly" le…
Vacua on the Brink of Decay
Guilherme L. Pimentel, Alexander M. Polyakov, Grigory M. Tarnopolsky
We consider free massive matter fields in static scalar, electric and gravitational backgrounds. Tuning these backgrounds to the brink of vacuum decay, we identify a term in their…
Vacuum Decay in CFT and the Riemann-Hilbert problem
Guilherme L. Pimentel, Alexander M. Polyakov, Grigory M. Tarnopolsky
We study vacuum stability in 1+1 dimensional Conformal Field Theories with external background fields. We show that the vacuum decay rate is given by a non-local two-form. This two…
The curious case of large-N expansions on a (pseudo)sphere
Alexander M. Polyakov, Zain H. Saleem, James Stokes
We elucidate the large-N dynamics of one-dimensional sigma models with spherical and hyperbolic target spaces and find a duality between the Lagrange multiplier and the angular mom…
Infrared instability of the de Sitter space
A. M. Polyakov
We continue to investigate various instabilities of the fixed backgrounds related to the de Sitter space. It is shown that in many cases the in/in perturbation theory contains IR/U…
Infrared Sensitivity of Unstable Vacua
Dmitry Krotov, Alexander M. Polyakov
We discover that some unstable vacua have long memory. By that we mean that even in the theories containing only massive particles, there are correllators and expectation values wh…