Gauge (non-)invariant Green functions of Dirac fermions coupled to gauge fields

Application of the background-field method to QCD and the electroweak Standard Model yields gauge-invariant effective actions giving rise to simple Ward identities. Within this method, we calculate the quantities that have been treated in the literature using the pinch technique. Putting the quantum gauge parameter equal to one, we recover the pinch-technique results as a special case of the background-field method. The one-particle-irreducible Green functions of the backgrou...

The true variables in QED are the transverse photon components and Dirac's physical electron, constructed out of the fermionic field and the longitudinal components of the photon. We calculate the propagators in terms of these variables to one loop and demonstrate their gauge invariance. The physical electron propagator is shown not to suffer from infrared divergences in any gauge. In general, all physical Green's functions are gauge invariant and infrared-finite.

We develop a non-perturbative framework to incorporate gauge field fluctuations into QED3 effective actions in the infrared by fermionic particle-vortex duality. The utility is demonstrated by the application to models containing N species of 2-component Dirac fermions in a couple of solvable and interpretable electromagnetic backgrounds: N = 1 or 2. For the N = 1 model, we establish a correspondence between fermion Casimir energy at finite density and the magnetic Euler-Heis...

Numerous correlated electron systems exhibit a strongly scale-dependent behavior. Upon lowering the energy scale, collective phenomena, bound states, and new effective degrees of freedom emerge. Typical examples include (i) competing magnetic, charge, and pairing instabilities in two-dimensional electron systems, (ii) the interplay of electronic excitations and order parameter fluctuations near thermal and quantum phase transitions in metals, (iii) correlation effects such as...

The problem of an electron gas interacting via exchanging transverse gauge bosons is studied using the renormalization group method. The long wavelength behavior of the gauge field is shown to be in the Gaussian universality class with a dynamical exponent $z=3$ in dimensions $D \geq 2$. This implies that the gauge coupling constant is exactly marginal. Scattering of the electrons by the gauge mode leads to non-Fermi liquid behavior in $D \leq 3$. The asymptotic electron an...

Generalizing the 't Hooft and Veltman method of unitary regulators, we demonstrate for the first time the existence of local, Lorentz-invariant, physically motivated Lagrangians of quantum-electrodynamic phenomena such that: (i) Feynman diagrams are finite and equal the diagrams of QED but with regularized propagators. (ii) N-point Green functions are C-, P-, and T-invariant up to a phase factor, Lorentz-invariant and causal. (iii) No auxiliary particles or parameters are int...

With particular reference to the role of the renormalization group approach and Ward identities, we start by recalling some old features of the one-dimensional Luttinger liquid as the prototype of non-Fermi-liquid behavior. Its dimensional crossover to the Landau normal Fermi liquid implies that a non-Fermi liquid, as, e.g., the normal phase of the cuprate high temperature superconductors, can be maintained in d>1, only in the presence of a sufficiently singular effective int...

An spectrum of an electron (quark) with ultrasoft momentum (p g^2T) is discussed at extremely high temperature in quantum electrodynamics (chromodynamics) with a resummed perturbation theory. We establish the existence of the pole suggested in the previous work of the electron (quark) propagator at ultrasoft region, and find that its pole position is p_0=\mp |p|/3-i\zeta, where \zeta is the damping rate which is of order g^2T ln 1/g, and the expression of its residue. We also...

The continuum Dirac model with an unbounded energy spectrum is widely used to describe low-energy states in various electron systems, such as graphene, topological insulators, and Weyl semimetals. However, if it is applied to analyze the electromagnetic response of electrons to a vector potential, we often find an unphysical result that breaks gauge invariance. This is an artifact caused by an energy or wavenumber cutoff, which is used to avoid divergence of the response. Her...

We discuss the formulation of the prototype gauge field theory, QED, in the context of two-particle-irreducible (2PI) functional techniques with particular emphasis on the issues of renormalization and gauge symmetry. We show how to renormalize all $n$-point vertex functions of the (gauge-fixed) theory at any approximation order in the 2PI loop-expansion by properly adjusting a finite set of local counterterms consistent with the underlying gauge symmetry. The paper is divide...