Quantcast
  • Register
PhysicsOverflow is a next-generation academic platform for physicists and astronomers, including a community peer review system and a postgraduate-level discussion forum analogous to MathOverflow.

Welcome to PhysicsOverflow! PhysicsOverflow is an open platform for community peer review and graduate-level Physics discussion.

Please help promote PhysicsOverflow ads elsewhere if you like it.

News

PO is now at the Physics Department of Bielefeld University!

New printer friendly PO pages!

Migration to Bielefeld University was successful!

Please vote for this year's PhysicsOverflow ads!

Please do help out in categorising submissions. Submit a paper to PhysicsOverflow!

... see more

Tools for paper authors

Submit paper
Claim Paper Authorship

Tools for SE users

Search User
Reclaim SE Account
Request Account Merger
Nativise imported posts
Claim post (deleted users)
Import SE post

Users whose questions have been imported from Physics Stack Exchange, Theoretical Physics Stack Exchange, or any other Stack Exchange site are kindly requested to reclaim their account and not to register as a new user.

Public \(\beta\) tools

Report a bug with a feature
Request a new functionality
404 page design
Send feedback

Attributions

(propose a free ad)

Site Statistics

205 submissions , 163 unreviewed
5,082 questions , 2,232 unanswered
5,353 answers , 22,786 comments
1,470 users with positive rep
820 active unimported users
More ...

  A question about the Bosonization of the Thirring model

+ 3 like - 0 dislike
6313 views

Is there a way or sense in which one can Bosonize this kind of a Lagrangian,

$L = \bar{\psi}\gamma^\mu \partial _\mu \psi + f(x) \bar{\psi}\psi$

for $f(x)$ being some function on space-time.

  • What is the most pedagogic reference which explains the Thirring Model/Sine-Gordon bosonization from scratch?
This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-04-25 01:58 (UCT), posted by SE-user user6818
asked Feb 20, 2014 in Theoretical Physics by user6818 (960 points) [ no revision ]

1 Answer

+ 3 like - 0 dislike

Try the lecture Classical Lumps and their Quantum Descendants (Lecture 6) from Sidney Coleman's Aspects of Symmetry - Selected Erice Lectures (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 185-264. I can think of no better place, since not only is Coleman a great expositor, but he also was the one who discovered this stuff.

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-04-25 01:58 (UCT), posted by SE-user Pedro Lauridsen Ribeiro
answered Feb 20, 2014 by Pedro Lauridsen Ribeiro (580 points) [ no revision ]
Does it deal with the example that I was talking of? (..I have tried reading one of Coleman's original papers and it was very hard to read - he used a lot of previous results from some Klaiber - and it became a mess...)

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-04-25 01:58 (UCT), posted by SE-user user6818
Sorry, I should have said that my answer refers to your second question (i.e. the Thirring / sine-Gordon bosonization). As for your first question, one must have in mind that bosonization of fermion fields only works in 1+1 dimensions (this is missing from your question). That being said, it doesn't look much different from bosonization of free fermion fields, although your model may get messy depending on the form of $f$. Do you have a specific $f$ in mind?

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-04-25 01:58 (UCT), posted by SE-user Pedro Lauridsen Ribeiro
Can you explain as to how do you think the 1+1 bosonization will work with that $f$? It seems you think it will! (...also it seems that Bosonization of these theories makes sense for higher-dimensions also - arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/9509173v2.pdf )

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-04-25 01:58 (UCT), posted by SE-user user6818
Your model is still free in the sense that the field equations are linear, but you no longer have a translation invariant vacuum state if $f$ is not constant. Nevertheless, you still have quasi-free reference states (i.e. such that all truncated $n$-point functions vanish for $n>2$) whose 2-point function have a short distance behavior similar to that of a vacuum state (the so-called Hadamard states). If one works with one of these states, the bosonization procedure shouldn't be that different from the standard one applied to Dirac fields in 1+1 dimensions.

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-04-25 01:58 (UCT), posted by SE-user Pedro Lauridsen Ribeiro
Bosonization of Dirac (free) fields in 1+1 dimensions, on its turn, can be found in books on string theory such as Green-Schwarz-Witten or Polchinski.

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-04-25 01:58 (UCT), posted by SE-user Pedro Lauridsen Ribeiro
I didn't understand your comment about Hadamard stats etc - can you give a reference? I checked Witten's lectures on Bosonization in the book "QFT and strings for physicists and mathematicians" (vol 2) - what I understand of his argument there is that the bosonization map between the fermionic operators and the bosonic operators is independent of the form of the interaction - that map is the same always as for free theories on both the sides.

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-04-25 01:58 (UCT), posted by SE-user user6818
Then I think that the equivalent bosonized Lagrangian for my case with a non-trivial $f$ should be whatever is gotten by doing the usual replacements of the free fermionic operators by their free boson duals - right?

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-04-25 01:58 (UCT), posted by SE-user user6818

Your answer

Please use answers only to (at least partly) answer questions. To comment, discuss, or ask for clarification, leave a comment instead.
To mask links under text, please type your text, highlight it, and click the "link" button. You can then enter your link URL.
Please consult the FAQ for as to how to format your post.
This is the answer box; if you want to write a comment instead, please use the 'add comment' button.
Live preview (may slow down editor)   Preview
Your name to display (optional):
Privacy: Your email address will only be used for sending these notifications.
Anti-spam verification:
If you are a human please identify the position of the character covered by the symbol $\varnothing$ in the following word:
p$\hbar$ysicsO$\varnothing$erflow
Then drag the red bullet below over the corresponding character of our banner. When you drop it there, the bullet changes to green (on slow internet connections after a few seconds).
Please complete the anti-spam verification




user contributions licensed under cc by-sa 3.0 with attribution required

Your rights
...