Locality in theory space
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Thaler_Locality in.pdf
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Author(s)
Kahn, Yonatan Frederick
Thaler, Jesse
Date Issued
July 2012
Journal
Journal of High Energy Physics
Publisher
Springer-Verlag
Citation
Kahn, Yonatan, and Jesse Thaler. “Locality in Theory Space.” Journal of High Energy Physics 2012.7 (2012).
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Locality is a guiding principle for constructing realistic quantum field theories. Compactified theories offer an interesting context in which to think about locality, since interactions can be nonlocal in the compact directions while still being local in the extended ones. In this paper, we study locality in “theory space”, four-dimensional Lagrangians which are dimensional deconstructions of five-dimensional Yang-Mills. In explicit ultraviolet (UV) completions, one can understand the origin of theory space locality by the irrelevance of nonlocal operators. From an infrared (IR) point of view, though, theory space locality does not appear to be a special property, since the lowest-lying Kaluza- Klein (KK) modes are simply described by a gauged nonlinear sigma model, and locality imposes seemingly arbitrary constraints on the KK spectrum and interactions. We argue that these constraints are nevertheless important from an IR perspective, since they affect the four-dimensional cutoff of the theory where high energy scattering hits strong coupling. Intriguingly, we find that maximizing this cutoff scale implies five-dimensional locality. In this way, theory space locality is correlated with weak coupling in the IR, independent of UV considerations. We briefly comment on other scenarios where maximizing the cutoff scale yields interesting physics, including theory space descriptions of QCD and deconstructions of anti-de Sitter space.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Theoretical Physics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1007/jhep07(2012)007
