Talk:Coleman–Weinberg potential

Untitled

This is a general encyclopædia; please add explanatory material to make the article more accessible to non-expert readers. 69.140.164.142 23:04, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Improving the article

Clarified what was done by Coleman and Weinberg... The page still lacks the Coleman-Weinberg effective potential as such! I wanted to put it here but at first would like to check the normalization of $\lambda$ used in the part of the article about superconduction theory. I'd normalize it in a way that in the lagrangian will be ${\frac {\lambda }{4!}}\phi ^{4}$ - as in the original paper and in some textbooks including Peskin-Shroeder. And it would be good to add more references. Don't think that there should be more about application of the idea of radiative breaking - the general article about spontaneous breaking is a more appropriate place. VeNoo (talk) 21:16, 4 June 2013 (UTC)

Proposed Revision: Changes to the First Equation

1. The Lagrangian given in the article is, more formally, a Lagrangian density. This should be specified in the preceding text and the $L$ in the equation should be written as ${\mathcal {L}}$.

2. The field $\phi$ is stipulated to be complex, meaning that whatever internal quantum numbers $\phi$ possesses, e.g., electric charge, the complex conjugate of the field, i.e., $\phi ^{*}$, has equal in magnitude but opposite in sign quantum numbers. For example: if $\phi$ has an electric charge of $Q_{e}=+1$, $\phi ^{*}$ possesses an electric charge of $Q_{e}=-1$. Consequently, the field operator $\phi ^{*}\phi$ is electrically neutral. More technically, one may say that $\phi ^{*}\phi$ is a "gauge singlet" for all $U(1)$ gauge theories under which $\phi$ is charged. The point is that the Lagrangian density as shown in the original equation contains $\phi ^{2}$ and $\phi ^{4}$ terms, which result in an overall charges of $+2$ and $+4$, respectively, assuming $\phi$ has a $Q_{e}=+1$ operator. This is contradictory to the requirement in quantum field theory that the Lagrangian (and the vacuum) must remain neutral under any conserved gauge symmetry. The proposed revision is to instead write

${\mathcal {L}}=-{\frac {1}{4}}(F_{\mu \nu })^{2}+(D^{\mu }\phi )^{*}(D_{\mu }\phi )-m^{2}(\phi ^{*}\phi )-{\frac {\lambda }{6}}(\phi ^{*}\phi )^{2}$

The overall normalization of each term, e.g., ${\frac {1}{6}}$ in the $(\phi ^{*}\phi )^{2}$ term still need to be checked for internal consistency. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 136.142.173.139 (talk) 16:28, 8 January 2014 (UTC)