2010/11/29 by Solomon Endlich, Alberto Nicolis, Riccardo Rattazzi +1 · 5 citations
Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Canonical quantization #Classical mechanics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Coupling (piping) #Degrees of freedom (physics and chemistry) #Mathematics #Mechanics #Physics #Quantization (signal processing) #Quantum #Quantum Electrodynamics and Casimir Effect #Quantum field theory #Quantum gravity #Quantum mechanics #Semiclassical physics #Unitarity #Vortex #hep-th #physics.flu-dyn
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/jhep04(2011)102
published as JHEP 04 (2011) 102 · 35 pages
arxiv created 2010/11/29 · openalex publication_date 2011/04/01 · arxiv updated 2011/06/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We consider the canonical quantization of an ordinary fluid. The resulting long-distance effective field theory is derivatively coupled, and therefore strongly coupled in the UV. The system however exhibits a number of peculiarities, associated with the vortex degrees of freedom. On the one hand, these have formally a vanishing strong-coupling energy scale, thus suggesting that the effective theory's regime of validity is vanishingly narrow. On the other hand, we prove an analog of Coleman's theorem, whereby the semiclassical vacuum has no quantum counterpart, thus suggesting that the vortex premature strong-coupling phenomenon stems from a bad identification of the ground state and of the perturbative degrees of freedom. Finally, vortices break the usual connection between short distances and high energies, thus potentially impairing the unitarity of the effective theory.