Abstract not found

We study a deformation of infinitesimal diffeomorphisms of a smooth manifold. The deformation is based on a general twist. This leads to a differential geometry on a noncommutative algebra of functions whose product is a star-product. The class of noncommutative spaces studied is very rich. Non-anticommutative superspaces are also briefly considered. The differential geometry developed is covariant under deformed diffeomorphisms and it is coordinate independent. The main target of this work is the construction of Einstein’s equations for gravity on noncommutative manifolds.

In this paper we study general properties of noncommutative field theories obtained from the Seiberg-Witten limit of string theories in the presence of an external B-field. We analyze the extension of the Wightman axioms to this context and explore their consequences, in particular we present a proof of the CPT theorem for theories with space-space noncommutativity. We analyze as well questions associated to the spin-statistics connections, and show that noncommutative N = 4, U(1) gauge theory can be softly broken to N = 0 satisfying the axioms and providing an example where the Wilsonian low energy effective action can be constructed without UV/IR problems, after a judicious choice of soft breaking parameters is made. We also assess the phenomenological prospects of such a theory, which are in fact rather negative.

We show that the matrix-model action for noncommutative U(n) gauge theory actually describes SU(n) gauge theory coupled to gravity. This is elaborated in the 4-dimensional case. The SU(n) gauge fields as well as additional scalar fields couple to an effective metric Gab, which is determined by a dynamical Poisson structure. The emergent gravity is intimately related to noncommutativity, encoding those degrees of freedom which are usually interpreted as U(1) gauge fields. This leads to a class of metrics which contains the physical degrees of freedom of gravitational waves, and allows to recover e.g. the Newtonian limit with arbitrary mass distribution. It also suggests a consistent picture of UV/IR mixing in terms of an induced gravity action. This should provide a suitable framework for quantizing gravity.

Dedicated to Rudolf Haag on the occasion of his 80 th birthday. We discuss a formulation of quantum field theory on quantum space time where the perturbation expansion of the S-matrix is term by term ultraviolet finite. The characteristic feature of our approach is a quantum version of the Wick product at coinciding points: the differences of coordinates qj − qk are not set equal to zero, which would violate the commutation relation between their components. We show that the optimal degree of approximate coincidence can be defined by the evaluation of a conditional expectation which replaces each function of qj − qk by its expectation value in opti-(q1 + · · ·+qn) mally localized states, while leaving the mean coordinates 1 n invariant. The resulting procedure is to a large extent unique, and is invariant under translations and rotations, but violates Lorentz invariance. Indeed, optimal localization refers to a specific Lorentz frame, where the electric and magnetic parts of the commutator of the coordinates have to coincide [11]. Employing an adiabatic switching, we show that the S-matrix is term by term finite. The matrix elements of the transfer matrix are determined, at each order in the perturbative expansion, by kernels with Gaussian decay in the Planck scale. The adiabatic limit and the large scale limit of this theory will be studied elsewhere. 1

Abstract not found

PROCEEDINGS

We show that there is a duality exchanging noncommutativity and non-trivial statistics for quantum field theory on R d. Employing methods of quantum groups, we observe that ordinary and noncommutative R d are related by twisting. We extend the twist to an equivalence for quantum field theory using the framework of braided quantum field theory. The twist exchanges both commutativity with noncommutativity and ordinary with non-trivial statistics. The same holds for the noncommutative torus.

We prove by explicit calculation that Feynman graphs in noncommutative Yang-Mills theory made of repeated insertions into itself of arbitrarily many one-loop ghost propagator corrections are renormalizable by local counterterms. This provides a strong support for the renormalizability conjecture of that model.

The framework of emergent gravity arising from Yang-Mills matrix models is developed further, for general noncommutative branes embedded in R D. The effective metric on the brane turns out to have a universal form reminiscent of the open string metric, depending on the dynamical Poisson structure and the embedding metric in R D. A covariant form of the tree-level equations of motion is derived, and the Newtonian limit is discussed. This points to the necessity of branes in higher dimensions. The quantization is discussed qualitatively, which singles out the IKKT model as a prime candidate for a quantum theory of gravity coupled to matter. The Planck scale is then identified with the scale of N = 4 SUSY breaking. A mechanism for avoiding the cosmological constant