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Using wavelet bases to separate scales in quantum field theory

Tracie Michlin, Palle E. T. Jørgensen, Paul S. Muhly, David E. Stewart, Ionut Chifan, Wayne Nicholas Polyzou

Published May 1, 2017• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

This thesis investigates the use of Daubechies wavelets to separate scales in local quantum field theory. Field theories have an infinite number of degrees of freedom on all distance scales. Quantum field theories are believed to describe the physics of subatomic particles. These theories have no known mathematically convergent approximation methods. Daubechies wavelet bases can be used separate degrees of freedom on different distance scales. Volume and resolution truncations lead to mathematically well-defined truncated theories that can be treated using established methods. This work demonstrates that flow equation methods can be used to block diagonalize truncated field theoretic Hamiltonians by scale. This eliminates the fine scale degrees of freedom. This may lead to approximation methods and provide an understanding of how to formulate well-defined fine resolution limits.

DOI
10.17077/etd.c55i0it1

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This thesis investigates the use of Daubechies wavelets to separate scales in local quantum field theory. Field theories have an infinite number of degrees of freedom on all distance scales. Quantum field theories are believed to describe the physics of subatomic particles. These theories have no known mathematically convergent approximation methods. Daubechies wavelet bases can be used separate degrees of freedom on different distance scales. Volume and resolution truncations lead to mathematically well-defined truncated theories that can be treated using established methods. This work demonstrates that flow equation methods can be used to block diagonalize truncated field theoretic Hamiltonians by scale. This eliminates the fine scale degrees of freedom. This may lead to approximation methods and provide an understanding of how to formulate well-defined fine resolution limits.
We investigate both the theoretical and computational aspects of using wavelet bases to perform an exact decomposition of a local field theory by spatial resolution. The decomposition admits natural volume and resolution truncations. We demonstrate that flow equation methods can be used to eliminate short-distance degrees of freedom in truncated theories. The method is tested on a free scalar field in one dimension, where the spatial derivatives couple the degrees of freedom on different scales, although the method is applicable to more complex field theories. The flow equation method is shown to decouple both distance and energy scales in this example. The response to changing the volume and resolution cutoffs and the mass is discussed.
Flow equation methods, more generally known as Similarity Renormalization Group (SRG) techniques, were developed to address multiscale problems where multiple length or energy scales contribute simultaneously. In this Thesis, we formulate the flow equation method within a wavelet-based framework and apply it to study scale (resolution) separation in a two-dimensional scalar field theory. We demonstrate that the flow systematically block-diagonalizes the Hamiltonian with respect to wavelet resolution, achieving improved truncation compared to earlier studies. Using a model of two real scalar fields coupled through a quadratic interaction, we show that the flow equations effectively suppress couplings between low- and high-resolution degrees of freedom. This provides a clear mechanism for isolating low-resolution physics and offers insight into the construction of effective Hamiltonians using a wavelet-based flow equation approac
We propose an effective Hamiltonian formulation of quantum field theories using a Daubechies wavelet basis in position space. Combined with flow-equation methods of the similarity renormalization group (SRG), this approach provides an efficient framework for analyzing quantum field theories by reducing the dimensionality of the Hamiltonian and systematically decoupling degrees of freedom across scales. As an application, the free scalar field theory has been reformulated within this framework to calculate the low-lying energy spectrum of the theory. These basis elements are known to transform the free scalar field theory into a theory of coupled localized oscillators, each of which is labeled by a location and a resolution index. In this representation, the Hamiltonian is naturally organized into fixed-resolution blocks, alongside blocks associated with the interactions between different resolutions. To decouple the different resolution modes and obtain a block diagonalized Hamiltonian with each block associated with a fixed resolution, the flow equation approach of SRG is applied. Finally, we demonstrate that with increasing resolution, the low-energy spectrum can be extracted from the effective lowest-resolution block of the Hamiltonian, leading to a significant reduction in computational cost.
We describe a multi-scale resolution approach to analyzing problems in Quantum Mechanics using Daubechies wavelet basis. The expansion of the wavefunction of the quantum system in this basis allows a natural interpretation of each basis function as a quantum fluctuation of a specific resolution at a particular location. The Hamiltonian matrix constructed in this basis describes couplings between different length scales and thus allows for intuitive volume and resolution truncation. In quantum mechanical problems with a natural length scale, one can get approximate solution of the problem through simple matrix diagonalization. We illustrate this approach using the example of the standard quantum mechanical simple harmonic oscillator.
We study the low energy dynamics of a system of two coupled real scalar fields in 1 + 1 dimensions using the flow equation approach of the similarity renormalization group in a wavelet basis. This paper presents an extension of the work by Michlin [Multiresolution decomposition of quantum field theories using wavelet bases, .] at one resolution higher. We also present the analysis of a model of two scalar fields coupled through a generally quadratic interaction in 1 + 1 dimensions using wavelet-based flow equations. We demonstrate that the specifically chosen generator flows the Hamiltonian into a block diagonal form with each diagonal block being associated with a fixed resolution. The wavelet basis is known to transform the scalar field theory into a model of coupled localized oscillators, each of which is labeled by location and resolution indices. The chosen interaction represents the coupling between two types of oscillators at the same location and resolution index. There is no coupling between oscillators across locations and resolutions. We show that wavelet-based flow equations carry out scale separation while maintaining the interactions between the two scalar fields at each resolution. The effective Hamiltonian associated with the coarsest resolution is shown to correctly reproduce the normal mode frequencies of the model.
A successful approach to understand field theories is to resolve the physics into different length or energy scales using the renormalization group framework. We propose a quantum simulation of quantum field theory which encodes field degrees of freedom in a wavelet basis---a multiscale description of the theory. Since wavelet families can be constructed to have compact support at all resolutions, this encoding allows for quantum simulations to create particle excitations which are local at some chosen scale and provides a natural way to associate observables in the theory to finite-resolution detectors.