Quantum gravity boundary terms from the spectral action of noncommutative space

We study the boundary terms of the spectral action of the noncommutative space, defined by the spectral triple dictated by the physical spectrum of the standard model, unifying gravity with all other fundamental interactions. We prove that the spectral action predicts uniquely the gravitational boundary term required for consistency of quantum gravity with the correct sign and coefficient. This is a remarkable result given the lack of freedom in the spectral action to tune this term.     

Super Riemann surfaces: Uniformization and Teichmüller theory

Teichmüller theory for super Riemann surfaces is rigorously developed using the supermanifold theory of Rogers. In the case of trivial topology in the soul directions, relevant for superstring applications, the following results are proven. The super Teichmüller space is a complex super-orbifold whose body is the ordinary Teichmüller space of the associated Riemann surfaces with spin structure. For genusg>1 it has 3g-3 complex even and 2g-2 complex odd dimensions. The super modular group which reduces super Teichmüller space to super moduli space is the ordinary modular group; there are no new discrete modular transformations in the odd directions. The boundary of super Teichmüller space contains not only super Riemann surfaces with pinched bodies, but Rogers supermanifolds having nontrivial topology in the odd dimensions as well. We also prove the uniformization theorem for super Riemann surfaces and discuss their representation by discrete supergroups of Fuchsian and Schottky type and by Beltrami differentials. Finally we present partial results for the more difficult problem of classifying super Riemann surfaces of arbitrary topology.Enrico Fermi Fellow. Research supported by the NSF (PHY 83-01221) and DOE (DE-AC02-82-ER-40073).     

Noncommutative geometric spaces with boundary: Spectral action

We study spectral action for Riemannian manifolds with boundary, and then generalize this to noncommutative spaces which are products of a Riemannian manifold times a finite space. We determine the boundary conditions consistent with the hermiticity of the Dirac operator. We then define spectral triples of noncommutative spaces with boundary. In particular we evaluate the spectral action corresponding to the noncommutative space of the standard model and show that the Einstein–Hilbert action gets modified by the addition of the extrinsic curvature terms with the right sign and coefficient necessary for consistency of the Hamiltonian. We also include effects due to the addition of a dilaton field.     

Cornelius Lanczos’s Derivation of the Usual Action Integral of Classical Electrodynamics

The usual action integral of classical electrodynamics is derived starting from Lanczos’s electrodynamics – a pure field theory in which charged particles are identified with singularities of the homogeneous Maxwell’s equations interpreted as a generalization of the Cauchy–Riemann regularity conditions from complex to biquaternion functions of four complex variables. It is shown that contrary to the usual theory based on the inhomogeneous Maxwell’s equations, in which charged particles are identified with the sources, there is no divergence in the self-interaction so that the mass is finite, and that the only approximations made in the derivation are the usual conditions required for the internal consistency of classical electrodynamics. Moreover, it is found that the radius of the boundary surface enclosing a singularity interpreted as an electron is on the same order as that of the hypothetical “bag” confining the quarks in a hadron, so that Lanczos’s electrodynamics is engaging the reconsideration of many fundamental concepts related to the nature of elementary particles.     

Spectral Action for Torsion with and without Boundaries

We derive a commutative spectral triple and study the spectral action for a rather general geometric setting which includes the (skew-symmetric) torsion and the chiral bag conditions on the boundary. The spectral action splits into bulk and boundary parts. In the bulk, we clarify certain issues of the previous calculations, show that many terms in fact cancel out, and demonstrate that this cancellation is a result of the chiral symmetry of spectral action. On the boundary, we calculate several leading terms in the expansion of spectral action in four dimensions for vanishing chiral parameter θ of the boundary conditions, and show that θ = 0 is a critical point of the action in any dimension and at all orders of the expansion.     

Symplectic and hyperkähler structures in a dimensional reduction of the Seiberg-Witten equations with a Higgs field

In this paper we show that the dimensionally reduced Seiberg-Witten equations lead to a Higgs field and we study the resulting moduli spaces. The moduli space arising out of a subset of the equations, shown to be non-empty for a compact Riemann surface of genus g ≥ 1, gives rise to a family of moduli spaces carrying a hyperkähler structure. For the full set of equations the corresponding moduli space does not have the aforementioned hyperkähler structure but has a natural symplectic structure. For the case of the torus, g = 1, we show that the full set of equations has a solution, different from the “vortex solutions”.     

The Green’s functions of the boundaries at infinity of the hyperbolic 3-manifolds

The work is motivated by a result of Manin in [1], which relates the Arakelov Green’s function on a compact Riemann surface to configurations of geodesics in a 3-dimensional hyperbolic handlebody with Schottky uniformization, having the Riemann surface as a conformal boundary at infinity. A natural question is to what extent the result of Manin can be generalized to cases where, instead of dealing with a single Riemann surface, one has several Riemann surfaces whose union is the boundary of a hyperbolic 3-manifold, uniformized no longer by a Schottky group, but by a Fuchsian, quasi-Fuchsian, or more general Kleinian group. We have considered this question in this work and obtained several partial results that contribute towards constructing an analog of Manin’s result in this more general context.     

Symplectic Structures of Moduli Space¶of Higgs Bundles over a Curve and Hilbert Scheme¶of Points on the Canonical Bundle

The moduli space of triples of the form (E,θ,s) are considered, where (E,θ) is a Higgs bundle on a fixed Riemann surface X, and s is a nonzero holomorphic section of E. Such a moduli space admits a natural map to the moduli space of Higgs bundles simply by forgetting s. If (Y,L) is the spectral data for the Higgs bundle (E,θ), then s defines a section of the line bundle L over Y. The divisor of this section gives a point of a Hilbert scheme, parametrizing 0-dimensional subschemes of the total space of the canonical bundle K _X , since Y is a curve on K _X . The main result says that the pullback of the symplectic form on the moduli space of Higgs bundles to the moduli space of triples coincides with the pullback of the natural symplectic form on the Hilbert scheme using the map that sends any triple (E,θ,s) to the divisor of the corresponding section of the line bundle on the spectral curve. Received: 15 January 2000 / Accepted: 25 March 2001     

The Spectral Action and Cosmic Topology

The spectral action functional, considered as a model of gravity coupled to matter, provides, in its non-perturbative form, a slow-roll potential for inflation, whose form and corresponding slow-roll parameters can be sensitive to the underlying cosmic topology. We explicitly compute the non-perturbative spectral action for some of the main candidates for cosmic topologies, namely the quaternionic space, the Poincaré dodecahedral space, and the flat tori. We compute the corresponding slow-roll parameters and we check that the resulting inflation model behaves in the same way as for a simply-connected spherical topology in the case of the quaternionic space and the Poincaré homology sphere, while it behaves differently in the case of the flat tori. We add an appendix with a discussion of the case of lens spaces.     

Supersymmetric QCD and Noncommutative Geometry

We derive supersymmetric quantum chromodynamics from a noncommutative manifold, using the spectral action principle of Chamseddine and Connes. After a review of the Einstein?CYang?CMills system in noncommutative geometry, we establish in full detail that it possesses supersymmetry. This noncommutative model is then extended to give a theory of quarks, squarks, gluons and gluinos by constructing a suitable noncommutative spin manifold (i.e. a spectral triple). The particles are found at their natural place in a spectral triple: the quarks and gluinos as fermions in the Hilbert space, the gluons and squarks as the (bosonic) inner fluctuations of a (generalized) Dirac operator by the algebra of matrix-valued functions on a manifold. The spectral action principle applied to this spectral triple gives the Lagrangian of supersymmetric QCD, including supersymmetry breaking (negative) mass terms for the squarks. We find that these results are in good agreement with the physics literature.     

Generating Functional in CFT and Effective Action for Two-Dimensional Quantum Gravity on Higher Genus Riemann Surfaces

We formulate and solve the analog of the universal Conformal Ward Identity for the stress-energy tensor on a compact Riemann surface of genus g > 1, and present a rigorous invariant formulation of the chiral sector in the induced two-dimensional gravity on higher genus Riemann surfaces. Our construction of the action functional uses various double complexes naturally associated with a Riemann surface, with computations that are quite similar to descent calculations in BRST cohomology theory. We also provide an interpretation of the action functional in terms of the geometry of different fiber spaces over the Teichmüller space of compact Riemann surfaces of genus g > 1. Received: 12 September 1996 / Accepted: 6 January 1997     

Stability of travelling wave solutions for coupled surface and grain boundary motion

We investigate the spectral stability of the travelling wave solution for the coupled motion of a free surface and grain boundary that arises in materials science. In this problem a grain boundary, which separates two materials that are identical except for their crystalline orientation, evolves according to mean curvature. At a triple junction, this boundary meets the free surfaces of the two crystals, which move according to surface diffusion. The model is known to possess a unique travelling wave solution. We study the linearization about the wave, which necessarily includes a free boundary at the location of the triple junction. This makes the analysis more complex than that of standard travelling waves, and we discuss how existing theory applies in this context. Furthermore, we compute numerically the associated point spectrum by restricting the problem to a finite computational domain with appropriate physical boundary conditions. Numerical results strongly suggest that the two-dimensional wave is stable with respect to both two- and three-dimensional perturbations.     

Local index theorem for orbifold Riemann surfaces

We derive a local index theorem in Quillen’s form for families of Cauchy–Riemann operators on orbifold Riemann surfaces (or Riemann orbisurfaces) that are quotients of the hyperbolic plane by the action of cofinite finitely generated Fuchsian groups. Each conical point (or a conjugacy class of primitive elliptic elements in the Fuchsian group) gives rise to an extra term in the local index theorem that is proportional to the symplectic form of a new Kähler metric on the moduli space of Riemann orbisurfaces. We find a simple formula for a local Kähler potential of the elliptic metric and show that when the order of elliptic element becomes large, the elliptic metric converges to the cuspidal one corresponding to a puncture on the orbisurface (or a conjugacy class of primitive parabolic elements). We also give a simple example of a relation between the elliptic metric and special values of Selberg’s zeta function.

     

GENERAL SOLITON SOLUTIONS OF THE NLS+ EQUATION UNDER NON-VANISHING BOUNDARY CONDITION

For the NLS⁺ equation under nonvanishing boundary condition, to avoid complexity due to Riemann surface, required for double-valued function of the usual spectral parameter, starting from a particular auxiliary spectral parameter, a special inverse scattering method is systematically developed, and explicit expressions of the general multi-soliton solutions are successfully obtained. Asymptotic behaviors of the muiti-soliton solutions, additional displacement of center and additional phase shift of the peak are derived. When the boundary value approaches zero, all the formulas become the known ones naturally.     

Hurwitz number of triple Ramified covers

Using symplectic cut-and-gluing formulae of the relative Gromov–Witten invariants, we get a recursive formula for the Hurwitz number of triple ramified coverings of a Riemann surface by a Riemann surface.     

Analogs of Bohr-Sommerfeld-Maslov quantization conditions on Riemann surfaces and spectral series of nonself-adjoint operators

In the paper, the semiclassical asymptotic behavior of the eigenvalues of some nonself-adjoint operators important for applications is studied (for the Sturm-Liouville operator with complex potential and the operator of induction). It turns out that the asymptotic behavior can be calculated using the quantization conditions, which can be represented as the condition that the integrals of a holomorphic form over the cycles on the corresponding complex Lagrangian manifold, which is a Riemann surface of constant energy, are integers. In contrast to the real case (the Bohr-Sommerfeld-Maslov formulas), to calculate a chosen spectral series, it is sufficient to assume that the integral over only one of the cycles takes integer values, and different cycles determine different series.     

Explicit quantization of the Chern-Simons action

We quantize the three-dimensional Chern-Simons action explicitly. We found that the geometric quantization of the action strongly depends on the topology of the (fixed-time) Riemann surface. On the disk the phase space and the symplectic structure are the same as those of the (chiral) Wess-Zumino-Witten model. On the torus the Hilbert space is the vector space of characters of Kac-Moody algebras. The fusion rules of the primary fields are derived from theclassical matching condition of the holonomy. In general case, the wave-functional of the theory is the generating function of the current insertion in Wess-Zumino-Witten model.     

Analytic Structure and Power-Series Expansion of the Jost Matrix

For the Jost-matrix that describes the multi-channel scattering, the momentum dependencies at all the branching points on the Riemann surface are factorized analytically. The remaining single-valued matrix functions of the energy are expanded in the power-series near an arbitrary point in the complex energy plane. A systematic and accurate procedure has been developed for calculating the expansion coefficients. This makes it possible to obtain an analytic expression for the Jost-matrix (and therefore for the S-matrix) near an arbitrary point on the Riemann surface (within the domain of its analyticity) and thus to locate the resonant states as the S-matrix poles. This approach generalizes the standard effective-range expansion that now can be done not only near the threshold, but practically near an arbitrary point on the Riemann surface of the energy. Alternatively, The semi-analytic (power-series) expression of the Jost matrix can be used for extracting the resonance parameters from experimental data. In doing this, the expansion coefficients can be treated as fitting parameters to reproduce experimental data on the real axis (near a chosen center of expansion E ₀) and then the resulting semi-analytic matrix S(E) can be used at the nearby complex energies for locating the resonances. Similarly to the expansion procedure in the three-dimensional space, we obtain the expansion for the Jost function describing a quantum system in the space of two dimensions (motion on a plane), where the logarithmic branching point is present.