From effective actions to actual effects in QED

The construction of low-energy effective actions in QED for several types of external conditions is reviewed. Emphasis is put on the application of these effective actions to a variety of physical effects which represent a manifestation of vacuum polarization. Soft-photon interactions with external electromagnetic fields and/or a heat bath are described, pair production at finite temperature is discussed, and finally a glance at photon-neutrino interactions is provided.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures, Talk given at "QED 2000", the 2nd workshop on frontier tests of quantum electrodynamics and physics of the vacuum, Trieste, Italy, Oct. 5-11, 200

Chiral phase structure of QCD with many flavors

We investigate QCD with a large number of massless flavors with the aid of renormalization group flow equations. We determine the critical number of flavors separating the phases with and without chiral symmetry breaking in SU(Nc) gauge theory with many fermion flavors. Our analysis includes all possible fermionic interaction channels in the pointlike four-fermion limit. Constraints from gauge invariance are resolved explicitly and regulator-scheme dependencies are studied. Our findings confirm the existence of an Nf window where the system is asymptotically free in the ultraviolet, but remains massless and chirally invariant on all scales, approaching a conformal fixed point in the infrared. Our prediction for the critical number of flavors of the zero-temperature chiral phase transition in SU(3) is Nf^{cr}=10.0\pm 0.29(fermion)[+1.55;-0.63](gluon), with the errors arising from approximations in the fermionic and gluonic sectors, respectively.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, updated discussion of the uncertainties in the gauge secto

Running coupling at finite temperature and chiral symmetry restoration in QCD

We analyze the running gauge coupling at finite temperature for QCD, using the functional renormalization group. The running of the coupling is calculated for all scales and temperatures. At finite temperature, the coupling is governed by a fixed point of the 3-dimensional theory for scales smaller than the corresponding temperature. The running coupling can drive the quark sector to criticality, resulting in chiral symmetry breaking. Our results provide for a quantitative determination of the phase boundary in the plane of temperature and number of massless flavors. Using the experimental value of the coupling at the tau mass scale as the only input parameter, we obtain, e.g., for N_f=3 massless flavors a critical temperature of T_cr ~ 148 MeV in good agreement with lattice simulations.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures; references added, results updated and discussion expanded (matches PLB version

Critical Schwinger pair production

We investigate Schwinger pair production in spatially inhomogeneous electric backgrounds. A critical point for the onset of pair production can be approached by fields that marginally provide sufficient electrostatic energy for an off-shell long-range electron-positron fluctuation to become a real pair. Close to this critical point, we observe features of universality which are analogous to continuous phase transitions in critical phenomena with the pair-production rate serving as an order parameter: electric backgrounds can be subdivided into universality classes and the onset of pair production exhibits characteristic scaling laws. An appropriate design of the electric background field can interpolate between power-law scaling, essential BKT-type scaling and a power-law scaling with log corrections. The corresponding critical exponents only depend on the large-scale features of the electric background, whereas the microscopic details of the background play the role of irrelevant perturbations not affecting criticality.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figur

Global surpluses of spin-base invariant fermions

The spin-base invariant formalism of Dirac fermions in curved space maintains the essential symmetries of general covariance as well as similarity transformations of the Clifford algebra. We emphasize the advantages of the spin-base invariant formalism both from a conceptual as well as from a practical viewpoint. This suggests that local spin-base invariance should be added to the list of (effective) properties of (quantum) gravity theories. We find support for this viewpoint by the explicit construction of a global realization of the Clifford algebra on a 2-sphere which is impossible in the spin-base non-invariant vielbein formalism.Comment: 6 page