Infinite order differential equations have come to play an increasingly significant role in theoretical physics. Field theories with infinitely many derivatives are ubiquitous in string field theory and have attracted interest recently also from cosmologists. Crucial to any application is a firm understanding of the mathematical structure of infinite order partial differential equations. In our previous work we developed a formalism to study the initial value problem for linear infinite order equations with constant coefficients. Our approach relied on the use of a contour integral representation for the functions under consideration. In many applications, including the study of cosmological perturbations in nonlocal inflation, one must solve linearized partial differential equations about some time-dependent background. This typically leads to variable coefficient equations, in which case the contour integral methods employed previously become inappropriate. In this paper we develop the theory of a particular class of linear infinite order partial differential equations with variable coefficients. Our formalism is particularly well suited to the types of equations that arise in nonlocal cosmological perturbation theory. As an example to illustrate our formalism we compute the leading corrections to the scalar field perturbations in p-adic inflation and show explicitly that these are small on large scales.
Differential equations with infinitely many derivatives, sometimes also referred to as ``nonlocal'' differential equations, appear frequently in branches of modern physics such as string theory, gravitation and cosmology. The goal of this paper is to show how to properly interpret and solve such equations, with a special focus on a solution method based on the Borel transform. This method is a far-reaching generalization of previous approaches (N. Barnaby and N. Kamran, Dynamics with infinitely many derivatives: the initial value problem. {\em J. High Energy Physics} 2008 no. 02, Paper 008, 40…
We study four-derivative corrections to pure $\mathcal{N}=2$, $D=5$ gauged supergravity. In particular, we find that, up to field redefinitions, there is a single four-derivative superinvariant that one can add to the action, up to factors of the two-derivative action. Consequently, this selects out a unique set of coefficients for the four-derivative corrections. We confirm these coefficients (in the ungauged limit) on the BMPV solution.
In this paper we will consider the most general quadratic curvature action with infinitely many covariant derivatives of massless gravity in three spacetime dimensions. The action is parity invariant and torsion-free and contains the same off-shell degrees of freedom as the Einstein-Hilbert action in general relativity. In the ultraviolet, with an appropriate choice of the propagator given by the exponential of an entire function, the point-like curvature singularity can be smoothened to a Gaussian distribution, while in the infrared the theory reduces to general relativity. We will also show …
The full off-shell one loop renormalization for all divergent amplitudes up to dimension 6 in the Abelian Higgs-Kibble model, supplemented with a maximally power counting violating higher-dimensional gauge-invariant derivative interaction $\sim g ~ ϕ^\dagger ϕ(D^μϕ)^\dagger D_μϕ$, is presented. This allows one to perform the complete renormalization of radiatively generated dimension 6 operators in the model at hand. We describe in details the technical tools required in order to disentangle the contribution to UV divergences parameterized by (generalized) non-polynomial field redefinitions. W…
