Criticizing the TGD based twistorial construction of scattering amplitudes

I have developed a rather detailed vision about twistorial construction of scattering amplitudes of fundamental fermions in TGD framework. These amplitudes serve as building bricks of scattering amplitudes of elementary particles. The construction allows to solve the basic problems of ordinary twistor approach.

Some of the key notions are 8-D light-likeness allowing to get rid of the problems produced by the mass of particles in 4-D sense, M⁸-M⁴× CP₂ duality having nice interpretation in twistor space of $H$, quantum criticality demanding the vanishing of loops associated with functional integral and together with Kähler property implying that functional integral reduces to mere action exponential around given maximum of K\"ahler function, and number theoretical universality (NTU) suggesting that scattering diagrams could be seen as representations of computations reducible to minimal computation represented by tree diagram. One ends up with an explicit representations for the fundamentl 4-fermion scattering amplitude.

The vision is discussed in Questions related to twistor lift TGD. For the necessary background see About twistor lift of TGD. One can however criticize the proposed vision.

What about loops of QFT?

The idea about cancellation of loop corrections in functional integral and moves allowing to transform scattering diagrams represented as networks of partonic orbits meeting at partonic 2-surfaces defining topological vertices is nice.

Loops are however unavoidable in QFT description and their importance is undeniable. Photon-photon cattering is described by a loop diagram in which fermions appear in box like loop. Magnetic moment of muon) involves a triangle loop. A further interesting case is CP violation for mesons involving box-like loop diagrams.

Apart from divergence problems and problems with bound states, QFT works magically well and loops are important. How can one understand QFT loops if there are no fundamental loops? How could QFT emerge from TGD as an approximate description assuming lengths scale cutoff?

The key observation is that QFT basically replaces extended particles by point like particles. Maybe loop diagrams can be "unlooped" by introducing a better resolution revealing the non-point like character of the particles. What looks like loop for a particle line becomes in an improved resolution a tree diagram describing exchange of particle between sub-lines of line of the original diagram. In the optimal resolution one would have the scattering diagrams for fundamental fermions serving as building bricks of elementary particles.

To see the concrete meaning of the "unlooping" in TGD framework, it is necessary to recall the qualitative view about what elementary particles are in TGD framework.

1. The fundamental fermions are assigned to the boundaries of string world sheets at the light-like orbits of partonic 2-surfaces: both fermions and bosons are built from them. The classical scatterings of fundamental fermions at the 2-D partonic 2-surface defining the vertices of topological scattering diagrams give rise to scattering amplitudes at the level of fundamental fermions and twistor lift with 8-D light-likeness suggests essentially unique expressions for the 4-fermion vertex.
2. Elementary particle is modelled as a pair of wormhole contacts (Euclidian signature of metric) connecting two space-time sheets with throats at the two sheets connected by monopole flux tubes. All elementary particles are hadronlike systems but at recent energies the substructure is not visible. The fundamental fermions at the wormhole throats at given space-time sheet are connected by strings. There are altogether 4 wormhole throats per elementary particle in the simplest model.

   Elementary boson corresponds to fundamental fermion and antifermion at opposite wormhole throats with very small size (CP₂ size). Elementary fermion has only single fundamental fermion at either throat. There is ν_Lνbar_R pair or its CP conjugate at the other end of the flux tube to neutralize the weak isospin. The flux tube has length of order Compton length (or elementary particle or of weak boson) gigantic as compared to the size of the wormhole contact.

3. The vertices of topological diagram involve joining of the stringy diagrams associated with elementary particles at their ends defined by wormhole contacts. Wormhole contacts defining the ends of partonic orbits of say 3 interacting particles meet at the vertex - like lines in Feynman diagram - and fundamental fermion scattering redistributes fundamental fermions between the outgoing partonic orbits.
4. The important point is that there are 2× 2=4 manners for the wormhole contacts at the ends of two elementary particle flux tubes to join together. This makes a possible a diagrams in which particle described by a string like object is emitted at either end and glued back at the other end of string like object. This is basically tree diagram at the level of wormhole contacts but if one looks it at a resolution reducing string to a point, it becomes a loop diagram.
5. Improvement of the resolution reveals particles inside particles, which can scatter by tree diagrams. This allows to "unloop" the QFT loops. By increasing resolution new space-time sheets with smaller size emerge and one obtains "unlooped" loops in shorter scales. The space-time sheets are characterized by p-adic length scale and primes near powers of 2 are favored. p-Adic coupling constant evolution corresponds to the gradual "unlooping" by going to shorter and shorter p-adic length scales revealing smaller and smaller space-time sheets.

Can action exponentials really disappear?

The disappearance of the action exponentials from the scattering amplitudes can be criticized. In standard approach the action exponentials associated with extremals determine which configurations are important. In the recent case they should be the 3-surfaces for which Kähler action is maximum and has stationary phase. But what would select them if the action exponentials disappear in scattering amplitudes?

The first thing to notice is that one has functional integral around a maximum of vacuum functional and the disappearance of loops is assumed to follow from quantum criticality. This would produce exponential since Gaussian and metric determinants cancel, and exponentials would cancel for the proposal inspired by the interpretation of diagrams as computations. One could in fact define the functional integral in this manner so that a discretization making possible NTU would result.

Fermionic scattering amplitudes should depend on space-time surface somehow to reveal that space-time dynamics matters. In fact, QCC stating that classical Noether charges for bosonic action are equal to the eigenvalues of quantal charges for fermionic action in Cartan algebra would bring in the dependence of scattering amplitudes on space-time surface via the values of Noether charges. For four-momentum this dependence is obvious. The identification of h_eff/h=n as order of Galois group would mean that the basic unit for discrete charges depends on the extension characterizing the space-time surface.

Also the cognitive representations defined by the set of points for which preferred imbedding space coordinates are in this extension. Could the cognitive representations carry maximum amount of information for maxima? For instance, the number of the points in extension be maximal. Could the maximum configurations correspond to just those points of WCW, which have preferred coordinates in the extension of rationals defining the adele? These 3-surfaces would be in the intersection of reality and p-adicities and would define cognitive representation.

These ideas suggest that the usual quantitative criterion for the importance of configurations could be equivalent with a purely number theoretical criterion. p-Adic physics describing cognition and real physics describing matter would lead to the same result. Maximization for action would correspond to maximization for information.

Irrespective of these arguments, the intuitive feeling is that the exponent of the bosonic action must have physical meaning. It is number theoretically universal if action satisfies S= q₁+iq₂π. This condition could actually be used to fix the dependence of the coupling parameters on the extension of rationals (see this). By allowing sum over several maxima of vacuum functional these exponentials become important. Therefore the above ideas are interesting speculations but should be taken with a big grain of salt.

For details see the new chapter Some Questions Related to the Twistor Lift of TGD of "Towards M-matrix".