On the running and the UV limit of Wilsonian renormalization group flows

Abstract

Abstract In nonperturbative formulation of quantum field theory, the vacuum state is characterized by the Wilsonian renormalization group (RG) flow of Feynman type field correlators. Such a flow is a parametric family of ultraviolet (UV) regularized field correlators, the parameter being the strength of the UV regularization, and the instances with different strength of UV regularizations are linked by the renormalization group equation. Important RG flows are those which reach out to any UV regularization strengths. In this paper it is shown that for these flows a natural, mathematically rigorous generally covariant definition can be given, and that they form a topological vector space which is Hausdorff, locally convex, complete, nuclear, semi-Montel, Schwartz. That is, they form a generalized function space having favorable properties, similar to multivariate distributions. The other theorem proved in the paper is that for Wilsonian RG flows reaching out to all UV regularization strengths, a simple factorization formula holds in case of bosonic fields over flat (affine) spacetime: the flow always originates from a regularization-independent distributional correlator, and its running satisfies an algebraic ansatz. The conjecture is that this factorization theorem should generically hold, which is worth future investigations.