Arbeitsgemeinschaft: QFT and Stochastic PDEs

Abstract

Quantum field theory (QFT) is a fundamental framework for a wide range of phenomena is physics. The link between QFT and SPDE was first observed by the physicists Parisi and Wu (1981), known as Stochastic Quantisation. The study of solution theories and properties of solutions to these SPDEs derived from the Stochastic Quantisation procedure has stimulated substantial progress of the solution theory of singular SPDE, especially the invention of the theories of regularity structures and paracontrolled distributions in the last decade. Moreover, Stochastic Quantisation allows us to bring in more tools including PDE and stochastic analysis to study QFT. This Arbeitsgemeinschaft starts by covering some background material and then explores some of the advances made in recent years. The focus of this Arbeitsgemeinschaft is QFT models such as the $\Phi^4$, sine-Gordon and Yang--Mills models as examples to discuss stochastic quantisation and SPDE methods and their applications in these models. We introduce the key ideas, results and applications of regularity structure and paracontrolled distributions, construction of solutions of the SPDEs corresponding to these models, and use the PDE method to study some qualitative behaviors of these QFTs, and connections with the corresponding lattice or statistical physical models. We also discuss some other topics of QFT, such as Wilsonian renormalisation group, log-Sobolev inequalities and their implications, and various connections between these topics and SPDEs.