Is Yang-Mills Theory Unitary in Fractional Spacetime Dimensions?

2023/01/04 by Jin, Qingjun, Ren, Ke, Yang, Gang +1 · 2 citations
#FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th)

paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2301.01786

Abstract

We present concrete evidence that Yang-Mills theory exhibits non-unitarity in non-integer spacetime dimensions. This violation of unitarity stems from evanescent operators that, while vanishing in four dimensions, are non-zero in general d dimensions. We demonstrate that these evanescent operators lead to the emergence of both negative-norm states and complex anomalous dimensions.

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