Quantum Field Theory on spherical space forms

Abstract

One of the fundamental questions in Quantum Field Theory regards the determination of a measure of the degrees of freedom of theories that is consistent with the Renormalization Group flow. The answer seems to be encoded in the C-theorems, that involve quantities which decrease with the Renormalization Group flow to the IR and are stationary at the fixed points, thus ordering the space of theories. In an originally different problem, inspired by the use of spherical space forms in cosmological models, we study the thermodynamic properties of a free theory at finite temperature defined on such spaces. We start by analyzing the case of a conformal scalar theory: from the zeta regularization of the effective action we compute the entropy, in whose high-temperature expansion we find a term ---often disregarded--- which does not depend on the temperature nor the radius of the covering sphere, which can be obtained also as the determinant of the zero-temperature theory on the spatial manifold, and which we relate to its topological properties. We consider in the case of a massive theory the same expansion, whose temperature-independent term depends on the mass, and we find that dependence resemblant to the behavior of a C-quantity. We then analyze the behavior of the same quantity for the free scalar and Dirac theories on real projective spaces in arbitrary dimension.