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# Fidelity balance in quantum operations

## Abstract

I derive a tight bound between the quality of estimating the state of a single copy of a $`d`$-level system, and the degree the initial state has to be altered in course of this procedure. This result provides a complete analytical description of the quantum mechanical trade-off between the information gain and the quantum state disturbance expressed in terms of mean fidelities. I also discuss consequences of this bound for quantum teleportation using nonmaximally entangled states.

As a general rule, the more information is obtained from an operation on a quantum system, the more its state has to be altered. This heuristic statement was first exemplified by the Heisenberg microscope gedankenexperiment , where the spatial resolution of the apparatus was shown to scale inversely with the uncertainty of the momentum transfered during the observation. Presently, the disturbance caused by the information gain has become an issue of practical significance, as it underlies the security of quantum key distribution .

The balance between the information gain and the state disturbance attracts currently a lot of interest, particularly in the context of quantum cryptography . Information theory provides a selection of concepts to quantify both the information gain and the state disturbance. The choice of measures for these two effects is usually dictated by the relevance to a specific application. In most cases, however, derivation of the actual balance represents a highly nontrivial task, especially if one is tempted to resign from numerical means. The purpose of this Letter is to present a formulation of the information gain versus state disturbance trade-off which is completely solvable using elementary analytical techniques. This formulation is motivated by recent works on quantum state estimation , where the information obtained from the operation is converted into an estimate for the initial state of the system.

The problem considered in this Letter can be formulated as follows. Suppose we are given a single $`d`$-level particle in a completely unknown pure state $`|\psi `$. We want to make a guess about the quantum state of this particle, but at the same time we would like to alter the state as little as possible. One can associate two fidelities with such a procedure. The first one, which we will denote by $`F`$, describes how much the state after the operation resembles the original one. The second fidelity, denoted by $`G`$, characterizes the average quality of our guess. It is natural to expect that these two quantities cannot take simultaneously too large values. What is the actual quantitative bound between them?

Two extreme cases are well known: if nothing is done to the particle we have $`F=1`$, but then our guess about the state of the particle has to be random, which yields $`G=1/d`$. On the other hand, the optimal estimation strategy for a single copy  yields $`G=2/(d+1)`$, but then the particle after the operation cannot provide any more information on the initial state; thus also $`F=2/(d+1)`$. I prove here that quantum mechanics imposes a general constraint between $`F`$ and $`G`$ in the form of the following inequality:

$$\sqrt{F\frac{1}{d+1}}\sqrt{G\frac{1}{d+1}}+\sqrt{(d1)\left(\frac{2}{d+1}G\right)}.$$
(1)
I also show that this inequality cannot be further improved, i.e. there exist quantum operations saturating the equality sign.

The most general strategy that can be applied to the particle has the form of a trace-preserving operation described by a set of operators $`\widehat{A}_r`$, where $`r=1,\mathrm{},N`$. These operators satisfy the completeness relation:

$$\underset{r=1}{\overset{N}{}}\widehat{A}_r^{}\widehat{A}_r=\widehat{𝟙}.$$
(2)
The classical information gained from this operation is given by the index $`r`$, which is subsequently used to estimate the initial state of the particle. The outcome $`r`$ of the operation performed on a state $`|\psi `$ is obtained with the probability $`\psi |\widehat{A}_r^{}\widehat{A}_r|\psi `$. This corresponds to the following conditional transformation of the quantum state:

$$|\psi \frac{\widehat{A}_r|\psi }{\sqrt{\psi |\widehat{A}_r^{}\widehat{A}_r|\psi }}.$$
(3)
We shall measure the resemblance of the transformed state to the original one using the squared modulus of the scalar product, equal $`|\psi |\widehat{A}_r|\psi |^2/\psi |\widehat{A}_r^{}\widehat{A}_r|\psi `$. Summation of this expression over $`r`$ with the weights $`\psi |\widehat{A}_r^{}\widehat{A}_r|\psi `$, and integration over all possible input states $`|\psi `$, yields the complete expression for the mean operation fidelity $`F`$:

$$F=\text{d}\psi \underset{r=1}{\overset{N}{}}|\psi |\widehat{A}_r|\psi |^2.$$
(4)
Here the integral $`\text{d}\psi `$ over the space of pure states is performed using the canonical measure invariant with respect to the group unitary transformations on the state vectors of the particle.

Given the outcome $`r`$ of the operation, we can make a guess $`|\psi _r`$ what the state originally was. The quality of this guess, assuming that the initial state was $`|\psi `$, can be quantified with the help of the overlap $`|\psi _r|\psi |^2`$. The mean estimation fidelity $`G`$ is given by the average of this expression over all outcomes $`r`$ with the probability distribution $`\psi |\widehat{A}_r^{}\widehat{A}_r|\psi `$, and by integration over states $`|\psi `$:

$$G=\text{d}\psi \underset{r=1}{\overset{N}{}}\psi |\widehat{A}_r^{}\widehat{A}_r|\psi |\psi _r|\psi |^2.$$
(5)
We will start derivation of the trade-off between the fidelities $`F`$ and $`G`$ by evaluating the integrals over $`|\psi `$. For this purpose, let us introduce in Eq. (4) two decompositions of unity in a certain orthonormal basis $`|i`$:

$`F`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{r=1}{\overset{N}{}}}{\displaystyle \underset{i,j=0}{\overset{d1}{}}}\psi |ii|\widehat{A}_r^{}|\psi \psi |\widehat{A}_r|jj|\psi `$ (6)
$`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{r=1}{\overset{N}{}}}{\displaystyle \underset{i,j=0}{\overset{d1}{}}}i|\widehat{A}_r^{}\widehat{M}_{ij}\widehat{A}_r|j`$ (7)
where by $`\widehat{M}_{ij}`$ we have denoted the following integrals of projectors on the states $`|\psi \psi |`$:

$$\widehat{M}_{ij}=\text{d}\psi \psi |ij|\psi |\psi \psi |=\frac{1}{d(d+1)}(\delta _{ij}\widehat{𝟙}+|ij|).$$
(8)
The second explicit form of the operators $`\widehat{M}_{ij}`$ has been derived in Ref. . This formula allows us to simplify the expression for the mean operation fidelity $`F`$ to the form:

$`F`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{d(d+1)}}\left({\displaystyle \underset{i=0}{\overset{d1}{}}}{\displaystyle \underset{r=1}{\overset{N}{}}}i|\widehat{A}_r^{}\widehat{A}_r|i+{\displaystyle \underset{r=1}{\overset{N}{}}}\left|{\displaystyle \underset{i=0}{\overset{d1}{}}}i|\widehat{A}_r|i\right|^2\right)`$ (9)
$`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{d(d+1)}}\left(d+{\displaystyle \underset{r=1}{\overset{N}{}}}|\text{Tr}\widehat{A}_r|^2\right)`$ (10)
Let us now consider the estimation fidelity $`G`$. The guess $`|\psi _r`$ can be represented as a result of a certain unitary transformation $`\widehat{U}_r`$ acting on a reference state, which we will take for concreteness to be $`|0`$:

$$|\psi _r=\widehat{U}_r|0$$
(11)
Using this representation, and changing the integration measure in Eq. (5) according to $`|\psi \widehat{U}_r|\psi `$, we can evaluate the integral over $`|\psi `$:

$`G`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{r=1}{\overset{N}{}}}{\displaystyle \text{d}\psi |0|\psi |^2\psi |\widehat{U}_r^{}\widehat{A}_r^{}\widehat{A}_r\widehat{U}_r|\psi }`$ (12)
$`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{r=1}{\overset{N}{}}}\text{Tr}(\widehat{U}_r^{}\widehat{A}_r^{}\widehat{A}_r\widehat{U}_r\widehat{M}_{00})`$ (13)
Inserting the explicit form of the operator $`\widehat{M}_{00}=(\widehat{𝟙}+|00|)/[d(d+1)]`$ yields:

$`G`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{d(d+1)}}\left({\displaystyle \underset{r=1}{\overset{N}{}}}\text{Tr}(\widehat{U}_r^{}\widehat{A}_r^{}\widehat{A}_r\widehat{U}_r)+{\displaystyle \underset{r=1}{\overset{N}{}}}0|\widehat{U}_r^{}\widehat{A}_r^{}\widehat{A}_r\widehat{U}_r|0\right)`$ (14)
$`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{d(d+1)}}\left(d+{\displaystyle \underset{r=1}{\overset{N}{}}}\psi _r|\widehat{A}_r^{}\widehat{A}_r|\psi _r\right)`$ (15)
This expression provides directly a recipe for optimal assignment of guesses $`|\psi _r`$ to outcomes of the operation: each of the components $`\psi _r|\widehat{A}_r^{}\widehat{A}_r|\psi _r`$ in the sum over $`r`$ is maximized if $`|\psi _r`$ is the eigenvector of $`\widehat{A}_r^{}\widehat{A}_r`$ corresponding to its maximum eigenvalue. Consequently, the maximum value of the mean estimation fidelity $`G`$ for a given operation $`\{\widehat{A}_r\}`$ can be written as:

$$G=\frac{1}{d(d+1)}\left(d+\underset{r=1}{\overset{N}{}}\widehat{A}_r^2\right)$$
(16)
where the operator norm is defined in the standard way:

$$\widehat{A}_r=\underset{\phi |\phi =1}{sup}\sqrt{\phi |\widehat{A}_r^{}\widehat{A}_r|\phi }.$$
(17)
In order to relate the fidelities $`F`$ and $`G`$ to each other, let us consider a polar decomposition of the operators $`\widehat{A}_r`$:

$$\widehat{A}_r=\widehat{V}_r\widehat{D}_r\widehat{W}_r$$
(18)
where $`\widehat{V}_r`$ and $`\widehat{W}_r`$ are unitary, and $`\widehat{D}_r`$ is a semi-positive definite diagonal matrix:

$$\widehat{D}_r=\underset{i=0}{\overset{d1}{}}\lambda _i^r|ii|,$$
(19)
with the diagonal elements put in a decreasing order: $`\lambda _0^r\mathrm{}\lambda _{d1}^r0`$. We will first show that only the diagonal matrices $`\widehat{D}_r`$ are relevant to the trade-off. Indeed, the modulus of the trace of the matrix $`\widehat{A}_r`$ appearing in Eq. (10) is bounded by:

$`|\text{Tr}\widehat{A}_r|`$ $`=`$ $`\left|{\displaystyle \underset{i=0}{\overset{d1}{}}}i|\widehat{W}_r\widehat{V}_r\widehat{D}_r|i\right|`$ (20)
$``$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{i=0}{\overset{d1}{}}}\lambda _i^r|i|\widehat{W}_r\widehat{V}_r|i|{\displaystyle \underset{i=0}{\overset{d1}{}}}\lambda _i^r`$ (21)
and moreover any quantum operation can be easily modified in such a way that the equality sign is reached. What needs to be done, is to follow the operation $`\{\widehat{A}_r\}`$ with an extra unitary transformation $`\widehat{W}_r^{}\widehat{V}_r^{}`$ depending on the outcome $`r`$. Let us note that this corresponds to the modification of the operation according to $`\widehat{A}_r\widehat{W}_r^{}\widehat{V}_r^{}\widehat{A}_r`$, which makes each element of the operation a semi-positive hermitian operator. As we are interested in the maximum value of $`F`$, we can further assume with no loss of generality that:

$$F=\frac{1}{d(d+1)}\left[d+\underset{r=1}{\overset{N}{}}\left(\underset{i=0}{\overset{d1}{}}\lambda _i^r\right)^2\right].$$
(22)
The expression for the estimation fidelity written in terms of $`\lambda _i^r`$ takes the form:

$$G=\frac{1}{d(d+1)}\left(d+\underset{r=1}{\overset{N}{}}(\lambda _0^r)^2\right).$$
(23)
In addition, the trace of the completeness condition given in Eq. (2) yields the following constraint on $`\lambda _i^r`$:

$$\underset{r=1}{\overset{N}{}}\underset{i=0}{\overset{d1}{}}(\lambda _i^r)^2=d.$$
(24)
To complete the proof of the inequality (1), it is convenient to introduce vector notation. Let us define $`d`$ real vectors $`𝐯_i=(\lambda _i^1,\mathrm{}\lambda _i^N)`$, where the index $`i`$ runs from $`0`$ to $`d1`$. Sums over $`r`$ appearing in Eqs. (22) and (23) can be written as:

$`f`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{r=1}{\overset{N}{}}}\left({\displaystyle \underset{i=0}{\overset{d1}{}}}\lambda _i^r\right)^2={\displaystyle \underset{i,j=0}{\overset{d1}{}}}𝐯_i𝐯_j`$ (25)
$`g`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{r=1}{\overset{N}{}}}(\lambda _0^r)^2=|𝐯_0|^2`$ (26)
where the dot denotes the scalar product, and $`||`$ is the standard quadratic norm. The completeness condition (24) for the operation $`\{\widehat{A}_r\}`$ written in the vector notation takes the form

$$\underset{i=0}{\overset{d1}{}}|𝐯_i|^2=d.$$
(27)
Let us now suppose that the vector $`𝐯_0`$ is fixed. The estimation fidelity is then given by $`G=(d+|𝐯_0|^2)/[d(d+1)]`$. What is the maximum operation fidelity $`F`$ that can be achieved with this constraint? The answer to this question is provided by an application of the Schwarz inequality to Eq. (25):

$$f\underset{i,j=0}{\overset{d1}{}}|𝐯_i||𝐯_j|=\left(\underset{i=0}{\overset{d1}{}}|𝐯_i|\right)^2=\left(\sqrt{g}+\underset{i=1}{\overset{d1}{}}|𝐯_i|\right)^2$$
(28)
We have excluded here from the sum over $`i`$ the norm of the vector $`𝐯_0`$ which is fixed and equal to $`\sqrt{g}`$. The sum of the norms of the remaining vectors can be estimated using the inequality between the arithmetic and quadratic means:

$$\frac{1}{d1}\underset{i=1}{\overset{d1}{}}|𝐯_i|\sqrt{\frac{1}{d1}\underset{i=1}{\overset{d1}{}}|𝐯_i|^2}=\sqrt{\frac{dg}{d1}},$$
(29)
where we have evaluated the sum $`_{i=1}^{d1}|𝐯_i|^2`$ using Eq. (27). Inserting this bound into Eq. (28) we finally obtain the inequality

$$f\left(\sqrt{g}+\sqrt{(d1)(dg)}\right)^2$$
(30)
which expressed in terms of the fidelities $`F`$ and $`G`$ takes the form of Eq. (1).

The necessary and sufficient conditions for a quantum operation to reach the equality sign can be most easily formulated in the vector notation. The Schwarz inequality (28) becomes equality if all the vectors $`𝐯_0,\mathrm{},𝐯_{d1}`$ are collinear. Furthermore, equation sign in Eq. (29) holds if and only if $`|𝐯_1|=\mathrm{}=|𝐯_{d1}|`$. It is straightforward to see that an exemplary operation satisfying these conditions for a given estimation fidelity $`G=(1+g/d)/(d+1)`$ is defined by:

$$\widehat{A}_r=\sqrt{\frac{g}{d}}|r1r1|+\sqrt{\frac{dg}{d(d1)}}(\widehat{𝟙}|r1r1|)$$
(31)
where the index $`r`$ runs from $`1`$ to $`d`$, and the projectors $`|r1r1|`$ are constructed using any orthonormal basis. This confirms the inequality (1) is indeed a tight one and cannot be further improved.

A simple transformation of Eq. (1) shows that the quantum mechanically allowed region for the fidelities $`F`$ and $`G`$ is bounded by a quadratic curve, which turns out to be a fragment of an ellipse given by the equation:

$$\begin{array}{ccc}(FF_0)^2+d^2(GG_0)^2\hfill & & \\ +2(d2)(FF_0)(GG_0)\hfill & =& \frac{d1}{(d+1)^2}\hfill \end{array}$$
(32)
with $`F_0=(d+2)/(2d+2)`$ and $`G_0=3/(2d+2)`$. The shape of the region for several values of $`d`$ is depicted in Fig. 1.

The balance between the operation and estimation fidelities derived in this Letter has interesting consequences in quantum teleportation based on nonmaximally entangled states. If two parties share a pure bipartite state of the Schmidt form $`|\text{tele}=_{k=0}^{d1}\mu _k|k|k`$, then the maximum teleportation fidelity attainable using this state is given by :

$$F_{\text{tele}}=\frac{1+\left(_{k=0}^{d1}\mu _k\right)^2}{d+1}.$$
(33)
Furthermore, for a nonmaximally entangled state the measurement performed during the teleportation protocol reveals some information on the teleported state. This information can be converted into an estimate for the initial state, whose maximum average fidelity has been shown to equal :

$$G_{\text{tele}}=\frac{1+\mu _0^2}{d+1}$$
(34)
where $`\mu _0`$ denotes the largest Schmidt coefficient for the state $`|\text{tele}`$. As the procedure of teleportation can be viewed as a special case of a quantum operation , the bound (1) applies as well to the pair of fidelities $`F_{\text{tele}}`$ and $`G_{\text{tele}}`$. Consequently, for a given teleportation fidelity $`F_{\text{tele}}`$, the maximum value of the estimation fidelity is achieved for the state $`|\text{tele}`$ satisfying the condition $`\mu _1=\mathrm{}=\mu _{d1}=\sqrt{(1\mu _0^2)/(d1)}`$. This condition defines a class of pure bipartite states which are optimal from the point of view of the trade-off between the teleportation fidelity and the estimation fidelity.

In conclusion, I have obtained a tight bound for the fidelities describing the quality of estimating the state of a single copy of a $`d`$-level particle, and the degree the initial state has to be changed during this operation. This result seems to be one of very few cases, when the trade-off between the information gain and the state disturbance can be derived in a closed analytical form.

I would like to acknowledge useful discussions with J. H. Eberly, C. A. Fuchs, N. Lütkenhaus, V. Vedral, and I. A. Walmsley. This research was partially supported by ARO–administered MURI grant No. DAAG-19-99-1-0125, NSF grant PHY-9415583, and KBN grant 2 P03B 089 16.


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# 1 Introduction

## 1 Introduction

Stochastic resonance(SR) is known as a phenomenon in which the presence of noise helps a nonlinear system in amplifying a weak (under barrier) signal . The features of systems exhibiting SR seem to be applicable to some natural systems such as sensory neurons, which are noisy and operate as threshold systems. Since SR produces an information-transmitting phenomenon, its positive role in the neuronal processes is to be revealed. In fact, a single neuron model described by the FitzHugh-Nagumo (FHN) equations exhibits SR behavior  and this SR effect is found in the real sensory neurons located in the tail fan of crayfish . The FHN equations driven by white noise and an arbitrary aperiodic signal are also examined in the context of excitable systems with threshold dynamics . One can expect that the SR effect will be more pronounced in an ensemble of systems than in a single system. In view of a collective response of globally coupled bistable systems to periodic forcing, a neural network with dynamics of the Hopfield type  is studied, under the assumption that white noise and the periodic signal are identical for all neurons .

Given the basic three ingredients, that is, a form of threshold, a source of noise and a weak input signal, SR can generally be observed in a large variety of systems. Considering the fact that deterministic chaos resembles the feature of noise and provides a source of fluctuation, we have a natural question whether SR-like behavior can be observed in deterministic dynamical systems in the absence of noise. Two different approaches to this problem are known. One way is to substitute the stochastic noise by a chaotic source. This situation in which the chaos is supplied as an additive noise, resembles the conventional setup for SR and yields SR-like enhancement as expected . The other approach is to use the intrinsic chaotic dynamics of a nonlinear map. No external source is necessary to provide the randomness. This method generates a sort of activated hopping process which is then synchronized by a weak periodic signal .

Until now, diverse types of chaos have been confirmed at several hierarchical levels in the real neural systems from single cells to cortical networks (e.g. ionic channels, spike trains from cells, EEG) . By producing chaos as effective noise spontaneously, biological systems may enhance their functions through signal amplification. This scenario is likely to have occurred even in the associative memory dynamics. The chaotic neural network model  is known as a framework beyond the Hopfield neural network  with only equilibrium point attractors. Its dynamic retrieving and learning features have been studied . In this paper, we set up a signal-driven scheme of the chaotic neural network with the coupling constants corresponding to certain information, and investigate the SR-like effects under its deterministic dynamics, comparing with the conventional case of the Hopfield network with stochastic noise.

## 2 Models

For N neurons connected by synaptic couplings $`w_{ij}`$ with $`w_{ii}=0`$, the system (signal-driven scheme) is described by

$`X_i(t+1)=f(h_i(t)+S_i(t)),`$ (1)
where $`X_i`$: output of neuron $`i(1X_i1)`$, $`w_{ij}`$: synaptic weight from neuron $`j`$ to neuron $`i`$, $`f`$: output function defined by $`f(y)=tanh(y/2\epsilon )`$ with the steepness parameter $`\epsilon `$, $`h_i`$: internal potential, $`S_i`$: contribution of external input signal. This form is a simple and possible incorporation of stimuli as the changes of neuronal activity. In the case of chaotic neural network (CNN) , the internal potential is given by

$`h_i(t)`$ $`=`$ $`\eta _i(t)+\zeta _i(t),`$ (2)
$`\eta _i(t)`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{j=1}{\overset{N}{}}}w_{ij}{\displaystyle \underset{d=0}{\overset{t}{}}}k_f^dX_j(td),`$ (3)
$`\zeta _i(t)`$ $`=`$ $`\alpha {\displaystyle \underset{d=0}{\overset{t}{}}}k_r^dX_i(td)\theta _i,`$ (4)
where $`\theta _i`$: threshold of neuron $`i,k_f(k_r`$): decay factor for the feedback (refractoriness) $`(0k_f,k_r<1),\alpha `$: refractory scaling parameter. Owing to the exponentially decaying form of the past influence, the dynamics of $`\{\eta _i\}`$ and $`\{\zeta _i\}`$ can be described as follows :

$`\eta _i(t)`$ $`=`$ $`k_f\eta _i(t1)+{\displaystyle \underset{j=1}{\overset{N}{}}}w_{ij}X_j(t),`$ (5)
$`\zeta _i(t)`$ $`=`$ $`k_r\zeta _i(t1)\alpha X_i(t)\theta _i(1k_r).`$ (6)
When $`\alpha =k_f=k_r=0`$, the network corresponds to the conventional discrete-time Hopfield network (we call the Hopfield network point (HNP)):

$`X_i(t+1)=f({\displaystyle \underset{j=1}{\overset{N}{}}}w_{ij}X_j(t)\theta _i).`$ (7)
We also look into the case that stochastic fluctuations are attached to HNP in Eq.(7):

$`h_i(t)={\displaystyle \underset{j=1}{\overset{N}{}}}w_{ij}X_j(t)\theta _i+F_i(t),`$ (8)
where $`F_i(t)`$ is a neuron-independent Gaussian white noise defined by $`<F_i(t)>=0`$ and $`<F_i(t)F_j(t^{})>=D^2\delta _{t,t^{}}\delta _{i,j}`$, and $`D`$ is the noise intensity parameter.We call Eq.(8) a stochastic neural network(SNN).

The synaptic configuration $`\{w_{ij}\}`$ is determined by storing pattern information in the network as minima of the computational energy :

$`E={\displaystyle \frac{1}{2}}{\displaystyle \underset{ij}{}}w_{ij}X_iX_j`$ (9)
at HNP. This is done by using a local iterative learning rule  for $`p`$ patterns $`\{\xi _i^\mu \}(\xi _1^\mu ,\mathrm{},\xi _N^\mu )`$, $`(\mu =1,\mathrm{},p`$; $`\xi _i^\mu =+1or1)`$ in the following form :

$`w_{ij}^{new}=w_{ij}^{old}+{\displaystyle \underset{\mu }{}}\delta w_{ij}^\mu `$ (10)
with

$`\delta w_{ij}^\mu ={\displaystyle \frac{1}{N}}\theta (1\gamma _i^\mu )\xi _i^\mu \xi _j^\mu ,`$ (11)
where $`\gamma _i^\mu \xi _i^\mu _{j=1}^Nw_{ij}\xi _j^\mu `$ and $`\theta (h)`$ is the unit step function.

## 3 Simulations and Results

To carry out computational experiments, we consider a network with $`N=156`$, $`\{\theta _i\}=0`$ and $`\epsilon =0.015`$(unless otherwise stated), and use non-orthogonal 20 random patterns $`R^1R^{20}`$ as a set of external signal: $`\{S_i\}=s\{\xi _i^\mu \}(\mu =1,\mathrm{},20)`$. $`s`$ is the strength factor of signal. $`\{\xi _i^\mu \}`$ ($`i=1,\mathrm{},N`$) is represented by $`12\times 13`$ binary data and a half of $`\xi _i^\mu `$’s has $`+1`$ and the other half has $`1`$. $`10`$ patterns $`R^1R^{10}`$ are stored with the above learning rule of Eq.(10) ($`p=10`$), and then the corresponding multi-stable landscape is made on the network dynamics.

As the temporal input signal $`\{S_i(t)\}`$, we take two kinds of signals. One is a random train composed of stored patterns $`R^1R^{10}`$ (e.g. $`[R^3R^7R^2\mathrm{}]`$) with a duration $`T_I`$ for every pattern and the other is a similar sequence of non-stored patterns $`R^{11}R^{20}`$. Figure $`1`$ shows typical examples of the results of temporal behaviors of the neural networks to input signal $`\{S_i(t)\}`$. An input random train of stored patterns ($`T_I=100`$) is given in Fig.1(a) by the relative overlap with pattern $`R^4`$:

$`m_I^4(t)={\displaystyle \frac{1}{N}}{\displaystyle \underset{i=1}{\overset{N}{}}}\stackrel{~}{S}_i(t)\xi _i^4,\stackrel{~}{S}_i=S_i/s.`$ (12)
Responses of CNN ($`k_f=0.1`$, $`k_r=0.7`$) and SNN to this signal with strength $`s=0.5`$ are shown in Fig.1(b) and (c) by

$`m_0^4(t)={\displaystyle \frac{1}{N}}{\displaystyle \underset{i=1}{\overset{N}{}}}X_i(t)\xi _i^4.`$ (13)
In CNN \[Fig.1(b)\], as we can see from three cases where $`\alpha `$ is $`0.125`$, $`0.375`$ and $`0.625`$, the performance of output response is largely affected by its refractory scale parameter $`\alpha `$. The response fits well the input signal when $`\alpha `$ is $`0.375`$. From Fig.1(c), similar behaviors are observed for SNN against the noise intensity parameter $`D(=0.25,0.75`$ and $`1.5)`$, except for the appearance of noise-driven fluctuations.

To evaluate the coherence between the signal {$`S_i(t)`$} and the response {$`X_i(t)`$}, we introduce the correlation coefficient $`r`$ and the discrimination efficiency $`n`$. These quantities are defined as

$`r={\displaystyle \frac{\overline{Dev(m_I^4)Dev(m_0^4)}}{[\overline{Dev(m_I^4)^2}]^{1/2}[\overline{Dev(m_0^4)^2}]^{1/2}}}`$ (14)
and

$`n=\overline{{\displaystyle \frac{1}{N}}{\displaystyle \underset{i=1}{\overset{N}{}}}\stackrel{~}{S}_i(t)X_i(t)},\stackrel{~}{S}_i=S_i/s,`$ (15)
where $`Dev(Y)`$ is the deviation $`Y\overline{Y}`$ and the overbar denotes an average over time. $`n`$ naively means the rate of information transfer from stimulus to response.

The numerical results of $`r`$ and $`n`$ plotted against refractory factor $`\alpha `$ are given in Fig.2, calculated using the temporal data at every different $`\alpha `$ values. The results for $`\{S_i(t)\}`$ of stored patterns $`R^1R^{10}`$ are in contrast with the results for $`\{S_i(t)\}`$ of non-stored patterns $`R^{11}R^{20}`$ in the range of $`\alpha `$ larger than about $`0.2`$ wherein the response is hopping out and into a well (minimum of the energy) corresponding to a stored pattern state. This movability causes an increased coherence with stored pattern stimuli. Under the same conditions of input signal, dependences of $`r`$ and $`n`$ on the noise intensity $`D`$ in SNN are examined as shown in Fig.3. Between stored and non-stored pattern signals, a quite difference like in CNN is also confirmed. Comparing the results for stored pattern signal, we can see that in CNN there appears a projected plateau for both $`r`$ and $`n`$, and in this flat region both of their values are kept very close to 1. Contrary to this, in SNN $`r`$ and $`n`$ have gradual variations with $`D`$ and $`n`$ degrades faster than $`r`$, which seems to be consistent with conventional SR. This comparison indicates that CNN can cause SR-like phenomena with high performance which cannot be attained in SNN.

In CNN, the stronger the signal strength $`s`$ is, this $`\alpha `$-range of the flat plateau becomes wider. Conversely, this range becomes narrower for weaker $`s`$. We illustrate this effect as coherent $`\alpha `$-range versus signal strength $`s`$ in Fig.4, together with the relationship of maximum Lyapunov exponent $`\lambda _1`$  to $`\alpha `$ when there exists no signal forcing. As $`s`$ decreases, the $`\alpha `$-range ($`r0.9`$) becomes narrow and at last disappears. Then the $`\alpha `$ value coincides with $`\alpha _{}`$ at the sudden rise point of the Lyapunov exponent $`\lambda _1`$. This fact tells that sensitive and flexible responses happen around the boundary between order and disorder, in other words, the edge of chaos . At $`\alpha <\alpha _{}`$, the refractory term ($`\alpha X_i`$) in Eq.(6) makes a well (minimum of the energy) shallow in effect and helps the input signal drive the network state. On the other hand, at $`\alpha >\alpha _{}`$ the chaotic attractor is driven by the input signal and stabilized to the corresponding network state.

Figure 5 shows return maps of the internal potential $`h_i`$ for a neuron ($`i=12`$) in CNN with no signal forcing ($`s=0`$) when $`\alpha >\alpha _{}`$. In the case of $`\alpha =58/128`$, the trajectories of $`h_i`$ are attracted into the region of square ($`0.50.5`$) such that controllable by the input signal $`s=0.5`$. When $`\alpha =96/128`$ (a deeper chaotic state), however, the trajectories are attracted outward so that chaos cannot be suppressed by the input signal $`s=0.5`$.

We have investigated all the above phenomena in other conditions of the parameters and the input signals, and have found similar results and overall tendency.

## 4 Conclusion

We have shown that the chaotic neural network can enhance weak subthreshold signals and have higher coherence abilities between stimulus and response than those attained by the conventional stochastic neural network model. The high coherent response is found to arise around the edge of chaos. This implies that some of SR phenomena may be realized by the inherent properties of deterministic nonlinear systems without any external noise. Analytical study to explain these results will be important in our future work. The coherent response concept is expected to be related to researches in cognitive neuroscience from dynamical system viewpoints .


text:
# Acknowledgements

## Acknowledgements

We would like to thank G. Arutyunov for valuable discussions. We would also like to thank K. Intriligator for his very illuminating remarks after the first version of the manuscript. R. M. and A. C. P. are supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.


text:
# Wilson loop via AdS/CFT duality11footnote 1Talk given by S. Förste.

## 1 Introduction

One important ingredient of the string dualities is the twofold description of D-branes as solitonic supergravity solutions and as submanifolds of spacetime where open strings may end. The second description leads to a gauge field theory on the world-volume of D-branes. Based on this general idea is Maldacena’s conjecture relating superconformal field theories to supergravity (or superstrings) living in a higher dimensional space with boundary. (For a review containing also a comprehensive list of references, see .) For example, $`𝒩=4`$ supersymmetric $`SU(N)`$ Yang Mills theory in four dimensions is dual to the type IIB string theory on $`adS_5\times S^5`$ space. The radii of the $`S^5`$ and the $`adS_5`$ are equal and related to the Yang-Mills coupling via $`R^2/\alpha ^{}=\sqrt{4\pi g_{YM}^2N}`$. (The string coupling $`g`$ is $`g=g_{YM}^2`$.) For supergravity to be a good effective description, we need the radius of curvature to be large and also the string coupling to be small. This means that we need $`g_s`$ small but $`g_sN`$ large. The latter is however the ’t Hooft coupling constant in the large $`N`$ field theory which is thus strongly coupled. Maldacena’s conjecture provides a new possibility to gain insight into strongly coupled gauge theory by studying weakly coupled string theory. As an application, Wilson loops have been computed in  and . The string configuration for a quark-antiquark pair separated by a distance $`L`$, is a long string on $`adS_5\times S^5`$, the ends of which are restricted to the (four dimensional) boundary of $`adS_5`$, where they are at a distance $`L`$ apart. The expectation value of the Wilson loop is then given by the effective energy of the string. We will review this computation in the next section. In the third section leading corrections are discussed. As a further application of our techniques we briefly review in section four membrany corrections to the Wilson surface in M5 theory. We conclude with a short summary.

## 2 Review

The dual description of $`𝒩=4`$ super Yang-Mills theory is a type IIB string living in $`adS_5\times S^5`$. In particular the target space metric ($`G_{MN}`$) is

$`ds^2`$ $`=`$ $`R^2[U^2(\left(dx^0\right)^2+\left(dx^1\right)^2+\left(dx^2\right)^2`$ (1)
$`+\left(dx^3\right)^2)+{\displaystyle \frac{dU^2}{U^2}}+d\mathrm{\Omega }_5^2].`$
Compared to  we have rescaled $`UR^2U`$, and also set $`\alpha ^{}=1`$. In addition there is a constant dilaton and $`N`$ units of RR-4-form flux through $`S^5`$. In order to compute the Wilson loop one minimizes the Nambu-Goto action  222After switching off the world-sheet fermions, the type IIB action reduces to the Nambu-Goto action.

$$S_{NG}=\frac{d^2\sigma }{2\pi }\sqrt{detG_{MN}_iX^M_jX^N}$$
(2)
with the boundary condition that the ends of the string are separated by a distance $`L`$ at $`U=\mathrm{}`$. We work in the static gauge ($`X^0=\tau `$, $`X^1=\sigma `$) and restrict to the case that all coordinates but $`U`$ are constant. The radial coordinate $`U`$ depends on $`\sigma `$. Then the (implicit) solution reads333In the following we will just take the upper sign with the understanding that the square root stands for both branches.

$$_\sigma U=\pm \frac{U^2}{U_0^2}\sqrt{U^4U_0^4},$$
(3)
where

$$U_0=\frac{\left(2\pi \right)^{\frac{3}{2}}}{\mathrm{\Gamma }\left(\frac{1}{4}\right)^2L}$$
(4)
is the minimal $`U`$-value the string obtains. The energy of the quark-antiquark pair is the length of the geodesic (open string) connecting them. One finds (after subtracting an $`L`$ independent infinite contribution from the self energy of the heavy quarks)

$$E=\frac{4\pi \sqrt{g_{YM}^2N}}{\mathrm{\Gamma }\left(1/4\right)^4L}.$$
(5)
This strong coupling result differs from the perturbative field theory computation ($`g_{YM}^2N`$ small), which predicts a Coulomb law with $`Eg_{YM}^2N/L`$. In general the numerator is a function of $`g_{YM}^2N`$ which interpolates between these two forms, and hence there ought to be corrections to (5) which is the result of a classical supergravity computation. Since $`adS_5\times S^5`$ is an exact string background , the first correction comes from the fluctuations of the superstring ($`R^2/\alpha ^{}`$ correction). In this talk we will report on work in this direction. Corrections due to string fluctuations have been discussed in , and subsequently in . Ref. considered corrections to the field theoretical result.

## 3 Fluctuations

The quantum theory of type IIB string in this background is described by the action in . It is a Green-Schwarz type sigma model action on a target supercoset. The usual sigma model expansion in $`R^2/\alpha ^{}`$ results in a power series in $`1/\sqrt{Ng_{YM}^2}`$. Since conformal invariance prevents the appearance of a new scale these corrections are not expected to change the $`1/L`$ dependence of $`E`$ on dimensional grounds. However they can modify the ‘Coulomb charge’.

The leading order correction is obtained by expanding around the classical configuration (3) to second order in fluctuations. We parameterize the bosonic fluctuations by normal coordinates: $`\xi ^a`$ on $`adS_5\times S^5`$, (here $`a=0,\mathrm{},4;5,\mathrm{},9`$ are local (flat) Lorentz indices; $`\xi ^4`$ is in the $`U`$ direction). Using the normal coordinate expansion one ensures that the functional measure for the fluctuations is translation invariant. This takes care of potential problems due to the curved target space. Ref.  has an extensive discussion on additional subtleties in the functional measures due to a curved world sheet.

At second order, the bosonic fluctuations in $`adS_5`$ and $`S^5`$ directions and the fermionic fluctuations decouple. Before writing their action, we define the combinations

$`\xi ^{}`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{U_0^2}{U^2}}\xi ^1+{\displaystyle \frac{\sqrt{U^4U_0^4}}{U^2}}\xi ^4,`$
$`\xi ^{}`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{\sqrt{U^4U_0^4}}{U^2}}\xi ^1+{\displaystyle \frac{U_0^2}{U^2}}\xi ^4,`$ (6)
which parameterize fluctuations along the longitudinal and perpendicular directions of the background string in the one-four plane. Now the $`adS_5`$ part of the action becomes

$`S_{adS}^{(2)}`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{4\pi }}{\displaystyle }d^2\sigma \sqrt{h}[h^{ij}\left({\displaystyle \underset{a=2,3,}{}}_i\xi ^a_j\xi ^a\right)`$ (7)
$`+`$ $`2\left(\xi ^2\right)^2+2\left(\xi ^3\right)^2+2{\displaystyle \frac{U^4U_0^4}{U^4}}\left(\xi ^{}\right)^2]`$
where $`h_{ij}`$ is (up to a factor of $`R^2`$) the classical induced world-sheet metric444For our purpose it is more convenient to work with the induced metric rather than the standard (conformally) flat one on the world-sheet.

$$ds^2=U^2\left(d\sigma ^0\right)^2+\frac{U^6}{U_0^4}\left(d\sigma ^1\right)^2.$$
(8)
Observe that $`\xi ^0`$ and $`\xi ^{}`$ do not appear in (7) (total derivatives have been dropped). Hence a natural choice to fix world-sheet diffeomorphisms is

$$\xi ^0=\xi ^{}=0.$$
(9)
The action quadratic in fluctuations in $`S^5`$ directions comes out to be

$$S_{S^5}^{(2)}=\frac{1}{4\pi }d^2\sigma \sqrt{h}h^{ij}\underset{a=5}{\overset{9}{}}_i\xi ^a_j\xi ^a.$$
(10)
The fermionic part of the action is given by plugging in the background (4) into the action of  and keeping terms quadratic in fermions. This action has local fermionic $`\kappa `$-symmetry which has to be fixed for the one-loop calculation. There is a proposal in the literature to this end. For our purpose, however, it turns out that the following choice is most convenient.555We will comment on a different choice below. We will set (in the notation of )

$$\left(\gamma ^{}\right)_\beta ^\alpha \theta ^{1\beta \beta ^{}}=0,\left(\gamma ^+\right)_\beta ^\alpha \theta ^{2\beta \beta ^{}}=0$$
(11)
where $`\gamma ^\pm =\gamma ^0\pm \gamma ^{}`$ with $`\gamma ^{}=\frac{U_0^2}{U^2}\gamma ^1+\frac{\sqrt{U^4U_0^4}}{U^2}\gamma ^4`$ (Cf. (6)). With this choice the target space spinors ‘metamorphose’ into world-sheet spinors, and the action is found to simplify substantially. The corresponding equations of motion are most compactly written for the ‘two-component’ world-sheet spinors $`\left(\begin{array}{c}\theta ^1\\ \theta ^2\end{array}\right)`$:

$$\left[i\left(\rho ^m_m\right)_\beta ^\alpha \delta _\beta ^\alpha \rho ^3\right]\left(\begin{array}{c}\theta ^{1\beta \alpha ^{}}\\ \theta ^{2\beta \alpha ^{}}\end{array}\right)=0.$$
(12)
The notation needs explanation. Firstly, the covariant derivatives act as

$`\left(_\pm \theta ^I\right)^{\alpha \alpha ^{}}`$ $`=`$ (13)
$`\left[\delta _\beta ^\alpha \left(_\pm \pm {\displaystyle \frac{\omega _\pm }{2}}\right)+\left(A_\pm \right)_\beta ^\alpha \right]\theta ^{I\beta \alpha ^{}},`$
where the tangent space derivatives

$$_\pm =\frac{1}{U}_\tau \pm \frac{U_0^2}{U^3}_\sigma $$
(14)
are defined with the help of a (inverse) zweibein $`ϵ_m`$ of the metric (8), $`\omega _m^{01}=ϵ_m^\tau \omega _\tau ^{01}`$ being the corresponding spin connection. There is an additional gauge field

$$A_\pm =\pm \frac{U_0^2}{U^2}\gamma ^{14}$$
(15)
for local rotations in the tangent one-four-plane. Finally, the matrices

$$\rho ^+=\left(\begin{array}{cc}0& 0\\ \gamma ^0& 0\end{array}\right),\rho ^{}=\left(\begin{array}{cc}0& \gamma ^0\\ 0& 0\end{array}\right)$$
(16)
satisfy a two dimensional Clifford algebra, and $`\rho ^3=[\rho ^+,\rho ^{}]`$. The fermionic action is easily inferred from the equations of motion (12).

Collecting our results (7), (10) and (12) one can write a formal expression for the 1-loop contribution to the effective action as a ratio of determinants of two dimensional generalized Laplace operators. These determinants suffer from divergences and can be regularized by, say, the heat kernel technique. The quadratic divergences cancel, but naively a logarithmic divergence remains, which may be absorbed in the (infinite) mass of the external quarks. As unsatisfactory as it may be, it does not affect our result for the correction to the Coulomb charge. More recently the authors of  have argued that this divergence should, as in flat space, actually cancel. As far as the corrections to the Coulomb charge are concerned the results of  and ours  are actually equivalent. In the following we demonstrate that the apparently different expressions for the fermionic operators in  and  are related to each other by a local Lorentz rotation666From the sigma model point of view this is just a field redefinition with unit Jacobian.. To this end, define

$$\theta ^I=S\psi ^I,$$
(17)
where we suppressed target space spinor indices. For the matrix $`S`$ we choose the one given in Ref., Section 6.3,

$$S=\mathrm{cos}\frac{\alpha }{2}\mathrm{sin}\frac{\alpha }{2}\gamma ^{14},$$
(18)
where

$`\mathrm{cos}\alpha `$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{U_0^2}{U^2}},`$ (19)
$`\mathrm{sin}\alpha `$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{\sqrt{U^4U_0^4}}{U^2}},`$ (20)
implying that

$$_\sigma \alpha =2U.$$
(21)
The Dirac operator for $`\psi `$ is given by conjugation by $`S`$ from the one for $`\theta `$. Using the fact that $`S`$ commutes with the $`\rho _m`$ and using ((14), (15))

$$S^1A_\pm S=S^1_\pm S=\pm \frac{U_0^2}{U^2}\gamma ^{14},$$
(22)
we find that the Dirac operator acting on the fields $`\psi ^I`$ (17) takes again the form (12), but now the connection $`A_\pm `$ has been gauged away. It is also easy to show that for the redefined spinors $`\psi ^I`$ the kappa-fixing condition takes the form (11), but with

$$\gamma ^{}S^1\gamma ^{}S=\gamma ^1,$$
(23)
which is the same as (6.35) in . This shows that the results in  are equivalent to ours.

## 4 Wilson surface in M5 theory

The Maldacena conjecture also applies to the case of M-theory living on $`adS_7\times S^4`$ being dual to the field theory on a stack of M5 branes. The metric of $`adS_7\times S^4`$ is

$$ds^2=l_p^2R^2\left[U^2\eta _{\mu \nu }dx^\mu dx^\nu +4\frac{dU^2}{U^2}+d\mathrm{\Omega }_4^2\right],$$
(24)
where we have rescaled the five-brane coordinates $`x^\mu `$ by $`R^{3/2}`$ as compared to, $`d\mathrm{\Omega }_4^2`$ is the metric on $`S^4`$. In the limit that the eleven dimensional Planck length $`l_p`$ goes to zero M-theory on $`adS_7\times S^4`$ is conjectured to be dual to the field theory on $`N`$ M5-branes, where the adS radius and the number of five-branes are related,

$$R=\left(\pi N\right)^{\frac{1}{3}}.$$
(25)
Higher curvature corrections will be small as long as $`N`$ is taken to be large. In analogy to the previously discussed Wilson loop one can study a Wilson surface in M5-theory. The set up is a membrane extending along the $`x^{0,1,2}`$ and the $`U`$ direction ending in two parallel lines separated by a distance $`L`$ at the boundary of $`adS_7`$. In the following we will recall this set-up (with slightly changed conventions) and thereafter study corrections due to fluctuations of the membrane. This will be a brief summary of the work presented in. The classical background corresponding to the Wilson surface is obtained by minimizing the world volume of the membrane

$$S=\frac{1}{2\pi }\sqrt{det\left(G_{MN}_aX^M_bX^N\right)}$$
(26)
with appropriate boundary conditions. The indices $`M,N`$ label the eleven target space coordinates and $`a,b`$ are world volume coordinates ($`\tau ,\sigma ,\varphi `$). By choosing the static gauge $`X^0=\tau `$, $`x^1=\sigma `$, $`X^2=\varphi `$ and assuming all other coordinates but $`U=U\left(\sigma \right)`$ to be constant one finds the solution,

$$_\sigma U=\pm \frac{U^2}{2U_0^3}\sqrt{U^6U_0^6}.$$
(27)
Requiring that the membrane ends in two parallel strings at distance $`L`$ determines the integration constant

$$U_0=\frac{2}{3L}B(\frac{2}{3},\frac{1}{2}),$$
(28)
where $`B`$ denotes Euler’s beta-function. Computing the vacuum energy density of this configuration one obtains (again after subtracting an $`L`$ independent infinite contribution to the self-energy of the strings) the potential between the two strings living on the M5-branes,

$$\epsilon _{pot}=\frac{2R^3}{27\pi }B(\frac{2}{3},\frac{1}{2})^3\frac{1}{L^2}.$$
(29)
This result is reliable for large $`N`$ where the geometry is not corrected and the classical approximation dominates. In  it was argued that there are no corrections to the geometry due to finite $`N`$. Another potential source for corrections are fluctuations of the membrane around its classical background described above. Again we expand in normal coordinates and obtain the action quadratic in bosonic fluctuations. We trade the fluctuations in one- and six-direction777The fluctuations are labeled by Lorentz indices; $`\xi ^6`$ is in the $`U`$ direction. for normal and parallel ones,

$`\xi ^{}`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{U_0^3}{U^3}}\xi ^1+{\displaystyle \frac{\sqrt{U^6U_0^6}}{U^3}}\xi ^6`$ (30)
$`\xi ^{}`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{\sqrt{U^6U_0^6}}{U^3}}\xi ^1+{\displaystyle \frac{U_0^3}{U^3}}\xi ^6.`$ (31)
The contribution from the $`adS`$ directions is

$`S_{adS}^{(2)}`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{4\pi }}{\displaystyle }d^3\sigma \sqrt{h}[h^{ij}{\displaystyle \underset{a=3}{\overset{5,}{}}}_i\xi ^a_j\xi ^a`$ (32)
$`+{\displaystyle \frac{3}{4}}{\displaystyle \underset{a=3}{\overset{5}{}}}\left(\xi ^a\right)^2+({\displaystyle \frac{9}{4}}R^{(3)})\left(\xi ^{}\right)^2]`$
where $`h_{ij}`$ is (up to a factor of $`R^2`$) the induced metric,

$$ds^2=U^2d\tau ^2+\frac{U^8}{U_0^6}d\sigma ^2+U^2d\varphi ^2,$$
(33)
and $`R^{(3)}`$ is the corresponding scalar curvature,

$$R^{(3)}=\frac{3}{2}\frac{U^6+U_0^6}{U^6}.$$
(34)
Again the three longitudinal directions $`0,2,`$ drop out of the action and we gauge them to zero. The bosonic fluctuations in $`S^4`$ direction have a simple action,

$$S_S^{(2)}=\frac{1}{4\pi }d^3\sigma \sqrt{h}h^{ij}\underset{a=7}{\overset{10}{}}_i\xi ^a_j\xi ^a.$$
(35)
In order to discuss the fermionic fluctuations we take the $`\kappa `$ symmetric action of. For our background the part quadratic in fermions consists out of terms containing $`\mathrm{\Gamma }^a`$ ($`a=0,\mathrm{},6`$), where $`\mathrm{\Gamma }^a`$ is an eleven dimensional gamma matrix. These can be written as $`\mathrm{\Gamma }^a=\gamma ^a\gamma ^5^{}`$ where the lower case gammas are gamma matrices in the tangent spaces of $`adS_7`$ and $`S^4`$, respectively. We split the 32-component spinors into two 16-component spinors ($`\theta ^1`$, $`\theta ^2`$) according to their eigenvalue with respect to $`\gamma ^5^{}`$. ($`\gamma ^5^{}\theta ^I=()^I\theta ^I`$.) A convenient kappa-fixing condition turns out be

$$\left(1(1)^I\gamma ^{02}\right)\theta ^I=0,$$
(36)
where now $`\gamma ^{}=\frac{U_0^3}{U^3}\gamma ^1+\frac{\sqrt{U^6U_0^6}}{U^3}\gamma ^6`$ . Imposing the kappa-fixing condition we find that the equations of motion for e.g. $`\theta ^1`$ are

$$\rho ^ae_a^i\left(_i+\frac{1}{4}\omega _i^{bc}\rho _{bc}+A_i\right)\theta ^1=\frac{3}{4}\theta ^1,$$
(37)
where $`e_a^i`$ and $`\omega _i^{bc}`$ are the vielbeine and spin-connections computed from (33) (for details see ). The matrices $`\rho `$ are

$$\rho ^0=\gamma ^0,\rho ^1=\gamma ^{02},\rho ^2=\gamma ^2$$
(38)
satisfying a 3d Clifford algebra. The field $`A_\sigma =\frac{3U}{4}\gamma ^{16}`$ is a background value for a gauge connection belonging to local rotations in the 1-6 plane. (For $`\theta ^2`$ one obtains the same result but with a minus sign in the definition of $`\rho ^1`$.) Note that the Dirac operator appearing in (37) is covariant from a world volume perspective. Collecting the results (32), (35) and (37) one can express the contribution to the energy density in terms of determinants of covariant operators. These can be analyzed using for example the heat-kernel method. In difference to the previously discussed string case one finds divergent contributions as well to the self-energy density as to the potential energy density. It would be interesting to investigate whether one can extend the arguments of  to cancel those divergences. (Since the discussion in  is quite heavily based on conformal invariance and 2d calculus this is not straightforward.) Finally, let us point out that also in the membrane case one can gauge away the connection appearing in (37). This can be achieved by a field redefinition $`\theta ^I=S\psi ^I`$ with

$$S=\mathrm{cos}\frac{\alpha }{2}\mathrm{sin}\frac{\alpha }{2}\gamma ^{16},$$
(39)
where

$`\mathrm{cos}\alpha `$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{U_0^3}{U^3}},`$
$`\mathrm{sin}\alpha `$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{\sqrt{U^6U_0^6}}{U^3}}.`$ (40)
The kappa-fixing condition is again (36) but with $`\gamma ^{}`$ replaced by $`\gamma ^1`$. This coincides with the kappa-fixing condition advertised in.

## 5 Summary

In this talk we presented techniques for computing stringy corrections to the Wilson loop in $`𝒩=4`$ supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory. The final result can be expressed in terms of determinants of 2d covariant operators. A result for the leading correction to the Coulomb charge in terms of a number is still missing (a rough estimate can be found in ). We commented on the relation between our results and those obtained in . In the end we reviewed the application of our techniques to the case of a Wilson surface in M5-theory. There the result is less satisfactory as divergences also affect the Coulomb charge.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by GIF (German Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research) and the EC programs ERB-FMRX-CT-96-0045 and 96-0090. D.G. acknowledges the support of the Humboldt Foundation. S.F. and S.T. thank the organizers of the Paris meeting for creating a pleasant and stimulating atmosphere during the conference.


text:
# 1 Introduction

## 1 Introduction

One could say that the aim of noncommutative geometry is to generalize geometrical tools to “spaces whose coordinates fail to commute” , (see also , , ). One way to implement this program is to start with a given geometrical theory involving sets $`X`$ endowed with additional structures and formulate them algebraically by using suitable subalgebras of the algebra of complex valued functions over $`X`$. Then one extends parts of the theory to noncommutative algebras, which are thought of as functions over “noncommutative spaces”. Although much of the construction takes place at the algebraic level, it is necessary, in order to use the powerful machinery of functional analysis, to represent these algebras as operators on a Hilbert space. Accordingly, this can be seen from a physicist’s point of view, as analogous to quantum mechanics: one trades the commutative algebra of functions over phase space for a noncommutative algebra of operators acting on a Hilbert space. Most of the geometrical ideas of classical mathematics can be “quantized”. For example, topology can be formulated in terms of C-algebras, commutative C-algebras corresponding to locally compact spaces. Thus, noncommutative ones are referred to as “continuous functions over noncommutative locally compact spaces”. In the compact case (i.e. when the algebra is unital), one can further define noncommutative vector bundles as finitely generated projective modules over a given unital C-algebra which plays the role of functions over the base space. When this algebra is commutative, Serre-Swan’s theorem asserts that these modules correspond to module of sections of vector bundles. Furthermore, methods of differential topology are also available within the realm of cyclic and Hochschild cohomology and this leads, via the coupling of the former with K-theory, to quantities that are stable under deformation and that generalize topological invariants, like, for instance, winding numbers and topological charges.

Noncommutative geometry has already proved to be useful in understanding various physical phenomena, like the integral quantum Hall effect  or the classical aspect of the Higgs sector of the standard model (see  for a review). Recent developments  and  also indicate that it is helpful in string theory. These last developments involve Yang-Mills fields defined on noncommutative spaces that fit into a broad formalism for gauge fields in noncommutative geometry which allows one to define connections, their curvature or the associated Yang-Mills action while preserving most of their classical aspects. For instance, one can prove a topological bound for the Yang-Mills action in dimension 4 . Also, one can construct a Chern-Simons type theory and interpret its behavior under large gauge transformations as a coupling between cyclic cohomology and K-theory .

In this report, we will be interested in constructing analogues of two dimensional non-linear $`\sigma `$-models within the noncommutative world. Since these models usually exhibit a very rich and easily accessible geometrical structure, we expect their noncommutative counterparts to be an ideal playground for a probe into the interplay between noncommutative geometry and field theory. This we shall try to exemplify by means of three different models: a continuous analogue of the Ising model which admits instantonic solutions, the analogue of the principal chiral model together with its infinite number of conserved currents and the noncommutative Wess-Zumino-Witten model together with its modified conformal invariance.

All ideas will be presented in a rather sketchy form and we refer to  (for fields with values in finite spaces) and  (for $`S^1`$-valued fields) for a detailed account.

## 2 General Aspects

In ordinary field theory, non-linear $`\sigma `$-models (see  for a review) are field theories whose configuration space consists of maps $`X`$ from a Riemannian manifold $`\mathrm{\Sigma }`$ with metric $`g`$, which we assume to be compact and orientable, to an other Riemannian manifold $``$ whose metric we denoted by $`G`$. In the physics literature, these manifolds are called source and target space respectively. By using local coordinates, the action functional is defined as

$$S[X]=\frac{1}{2\pi }_\mathrm{\Sigma }\sqrt{g}g^{\mu \nu }G_{ij}(X)_\mu X^i_\nu X^j,$$
(1)
where as usual $`g=detg_{\mu \nu }`$ and $`g^{\mu \nu }`$ is the inverse of $`g_{\mu \nu }`$. When $`\mathrm{\Sigma }`$ is two dimensional, the action $`S`$ is conformally invariant, since a rescaling of the metric $`gge^\sigma `$, with $`\sigma `$ being any map from $`\mathrm{\Sigma }`$ to $``$, leaves it invariant. Accordingly, the action only depends on the conformal class of the metric and may be rewritten using a complex structure on $`\mathrm{\Sigma }`$ as

$$S[X]=\frac{i}{\pi }_\mathrm{\Sigma }G_{ij}(X)X^i\overline{}X^j$$
(2)
where $`=_zdz`$ and $`\overline{}=_{\overline{z}}d\overline{z}`$, $`z`$ being a suitable local complex coordinate.

Different choices of the source and target spaces lead to different field theories, some of them playing a major role in physics. Especially interesting are their applications to statistical field theory, and (supplemented by some supersymmetries) they are the basic building blocks of superstring theories.

From the mathematical point of view, the stationary points of the action functional (1) are harmonic maps from $`\mathrm{\Sigma }`$ to $``$ and describe the extremal surfaces embedded in $``$. Thus, a noncommutative generalization of the action functional of the non-linear $`\sigma `$-model should yield, as stationary points, noncommutative analogues of harmonic maps.

To generalize such a construction to the noncommutative case, we must dualize the previous picture and reformulate it in terms of the $``$-algebras $`𝒜`$ and $``$ of complex valued smooth functions defined respectively on $`\mathrm{\Sigma }`$ and $``$. Embeddings $`X`$ of $`\mathrm{\Sigma }`$ into $``$ are in one to one correspondence with $``$-algebra morphisms $`\pi `$ from $``$ to $`𝒜`$, the correspondence being simply $`\pi _X(f)=fX`$. Since this makes perfectly sense in the noncommutative case, we define our configuration space, for fixed, not necessarily commutative algebras $`𝒜`$ and $``$, as the space of all $``$-algebra morphisms from $``$ to $`𝒜`$.

The construction of the action functional is more tricky since it involves noncommutative generalizations of the conformal and Riemannian geometries. Following an idea of Connes  and , the former can be understood within the framework of positive Hochschild cohomology. Without entering into details, one observes that, in the commutative case, the trilinear map on $`𝒜^3`$ defined by

$$\varphi (f_0,f_1,f_2)=\frac{i}{\pi }_\mathrm{\Sigma }f_0f_1\overline{}f_2$$
(3)
is an extremal element of the space of positive Hochschild cocycles that belongs to the cohomology class of the cyclic cocycle $`\psi `$ defined by

$$\psi (f_0,f_1,f_2)=\frac{i}{2\pi }_\mathrm{\Sigma }f_0𝑑f_1df_2.$$
(4)
Again, we refer to  for the general definitions and we simply notice that (3)-(4) still make sense for a general noncommutative algebra $`𝒜`$.

Roughly speaking, one can say that $`\psi `$ allows to integrate 2-forms in dimension 2,

$$\frac{i}{2\pi }a_0𝑑a_1𝑑a_2=\psi (a_0,a_1,a_2)$$
(5)
so that it is a metric independent object, whereas $`\varphi `$ defines a suitable scalar product

$$a_0da_1,b_0db_1=\varphi (b_0^{}a_0,a_1,b_1^{})$$
(6)
on the space of 1-forms and thus depends on the conformal class of the metric. Furthermore, this scalar product is positive and invariant with respect to the action of the unitary elements of $`𝒜`$ on 1-forms, and its relation to the cyclic cocylic $`\psi `$ allows to prove various inequalities involving topological quantities.

Having such a cocycle $`\varphi `$, it is natural to compose it with a morphism $`\pi :𝒜`$ in order to obtain a positive cocycle on $``$ defined by $`\varphi _\pi =\varphi (\pi \pi \pi )`$. Since our goal is to build an action functional, which assigns a number to any morphism $`\pi `$, we have to evaluate the previous cocycle on a suitably chosen element of $`^3`$. Such an element is provided by the noncommutative analogue of the metric on the target, which we take simply as a positive element $`G=_ib_0^i\delta b_1^i\delta b_2^i`$ of the space of universal 2-forms $`\mathrm{\Omega }^2()`$. Thus

$$S[\pi ]=\varphi _\pi (G)$$
(7)
is well defined and positive and we take it as a noncommutative analogue of the action functional of the non linear $`\sigma `$-model. Of course we consider $`\pi `$ as the dynamical variable (the embedding) whereas $`\varphi `$ (the conformal structure on the source) and $`G`$ (the metric on the target) are background structures that have been fixed.

As an alternative, one could consider that only the metric $`G`$ on the target is a background field, since the morphism $`\pi :𝒜`$ allows to define the induced metric $`\pi _{}G`$ on the source as

$$\pi _{}G=\underset{i}{}\pi (b_0^i)\delta \pi (b_1^i)\delta \pi (b_2^i),$$
(8)
which is obviously a positive universal 2-form on $`𝒜`$. To such an object one can associate, by means of a variational problem (see  and ), a positive Hochschild cocycle that stands for the conformal class of the induced metric. As a result, the critical points of the corresponding $`\sigma `$-model describe “minimally embedded surfaces” in the noncommutative space associated with $``$.

A scrupulous reader may be puzzled by such a formal and sketchy construction. However, in what follows we will mainly work out examples involving the noncommutative torus and only consider a fixed $`\varphi `$ and fixed metrics on the two target space we will consider (the circle and the two point space). Accordingly, $`\varphi `$ and $`G`$ could be replaced by their explicit expressions. Nevertheless, we think that it may be useful to have a general setting. In particular, one easily reconstructs ordinary $`\sigma `$-models with suitable choices of $`\varphi `$ and $`G`$.

## 3 Two points as a target space

### 3.1 A General Construction

The simplest example of a target space one can think of is that of a finite space made of two points, like in the Ising model. Of course, any continuous map from a connected surface to a discrete space is constant and the resulting (commutative) theory would be trivial. However, this is no longer true if the source is a noncommutative space and one has, in general, lots of such maps (i.e. algebra morphisms).

Let us first notice that the algebra $`=^2`$ of functions over a two point space is the unital algebra generated by a hermitian projection $`e,e^2=e^{}=e`$. Thus, any $``$-algebra morphism $`\pi `$ from $``$ to $`𝒜`$ is given by a hermitian projection $`p=\pi (e)`$ in $`𝒜`$. Choosing the metric $`G=\delta e\delta e`$ on the space of two points, the action functional simply reads

$$S[p]=\varphi (1,p,p),$$
(9)
where $`\varphi `$ is a given Hochschild cocycle standing for the conformal structure. Of course, one could choose other metrics on the two points space, but $`G`$ is more interesting since it will lead to a topological bound for the corresponding action. We shall prove this fact for the noncommutative torus, but the procedure is general and only uses the idea of positivity in Hochschild cohomology.

### 3.2 The noncommutative two torus as a source space

For the sake of completeness we recall the very basic aspects of the noncommutative torus and refer the reader to  for a thorough survey. The algebra $`𝒜_\theta `$ of smooth functions on the noncommutative torus is the unital $``$-algebra made of power series of the form

$$a=\underset{m,n^2}{}a_{mn}U_1^mU_2^n,$$
(10)
with $`a_{mn}`$ a complex-valued Schwarz function on $`^2`$ that is, the sequence of complex numbers $`\{a_{mn},(m,n)^2\}`$ decreases rapidly at ‘infinity’. The two unitary elements $`U_1,U_2`$ have commutation relations

$$U_2U_1=e^{2\pi i\theta }U_1U_2.$$
(11)
On $`𝒜_\theta `$ there is a unique normalized positive definite trace which we shall unusually denote by an integral symbol $`:𝒜_\theta `$ and which is given by

$$(\underset{(m,n)^2}{}a_{mn}U_1^mU_2^n)=:a_{00}.$$
(12)
This trace is invariant under the action of the commutative torus $`T^2`$ on $`𝒜_\theta `$ whose infinitesimal form is determined by two commuting derivations $`_1,_2`$ acting by

$$_\mu (U_\nu )=2\pi i\delta _\mu ^\nu U_\nu ,\mu ,\nu =1,2.$$
(13)
The invariance just being the statement that $`_\mu (a)=0,\mu =1,2`$ for any $`a𝒜_\theta `$.

All the previous properties, even if elementary, turn out to be important for our construction since they allow us to use all tools of elementary calculus on a commutative torus. However one must bear in mind that, in order to develop a more general setting, one should work only with the corresponding cyclic and Hochschild cocycles that we shall now describe.

The cyclic 2-cocycle associated to the integration of 2-forms is simply given by

$$\psi (a_0,a_1,a_2)=\frac{i}{2\pi }ϵ_{\mu \nu }a_0_\mu a_1_\nu a_2,$$
(14)
where $`ϵ_{\mu \nu }`$ is the standard antisymmetric tensor. Its normalization ensures that for any hermitian projector $`p𝒜_\theta `$, the quantity $`\psi (p,p,p)`$ is an integer: it is indeed the index of a Fredholm operator.

Working with the standard Euclidean metric on the torus, the Hochschild cocycle $`\varphi `$ is

$$\varphi (a_0,a_1,a_2)=\frac{2}{\pi }a_0a_1\overline{}a_2$$
(15)
where the complex derivations $`=1/2(_1i_2)`$ and $`\overline{}=1/2(_1+i_2)`$ are combination of the previous derivations. Note that we consider $``$ and $`\overline{}`$ as maps with values in $`𝒜_\theta `$ and not in the bimodule of 1-forms. A construction of the cocycle (15) as the conformal class of the Euclidean metric on the torus can be found in  and . We remark that one can also work with a general constant metric whose conformal class is parametrized by a complex number $`\tau `$ that belongs to the upper half plane.

Accordingly, the action functional for our non-linear $`\sigma `$-model reads

$$\varphi (1,p,p)=\frac{1}{2\pi }_\mu p_\mu p=\frac{1}{\pi }p_\mu p_\mu p,$$
(16)
the contraction with the Euclidean metric being understood.

As a subset of a topological vector space, the space $`𝒫_\theta `$ of all hermitian projectors of $`𝒜_\theta `$ comes equipped with a natural topology (in fact it is an infinite dimensional manifold) and we are interested in the study of the critical points of the action in a given connected component of $`𝒫_\theta `$. By carefully taking into account the non linear structure of the space $`𝒫_\theta `$, we get the field equations

$$p\mathrm{\Delta }(p)\mathrm{\Delta }(p)p=0.$$
(17)
where $`\mathrm{\Delta }=_\mu _\mu `$ is the laplacian.

The previous equation is a non linear equation of the second order and it is rather difficult to explicit its solutions in closed form. Following a standard route, we shall show that the absolute minima of (3.2) in a given connected component of $`𝒫_\theta `$ actually fulfill a first order equation which is easily solved.

Given a projector $`p𝒫_\theta `$, there is a ‘topological charge’ (the first Chern number) defined by

$$Q(p)=:\frac{1}{2\pi i}p[_1(p)_2(p)_2(p)_1(p)].$$
(18)
As in four dimensional Yang-Mills theory, this topological quantity yields a bound for the action functional.

Due to positivity of the trace $``$ and its cyclic property, we have

$$\left[_\mu (p)p\pm iϵ_{\mu \alpha }_\alpha (p)p\right]^{}\left[_\mu (p)p\pm iϵ_{\mu \beta }_\beta (p)p\right]0,$$
(19)
from which we obtain the inequality

$$S(p)\pm 2Q(p).$$
(20)
The inequality (20), which gives a lower bound for the action, is the analogue of the one for ordinary $`\sigma `$-models . Also, it is a two dimensional analogue of the inequality that occurs in four dimensional Yang-Mills theory. A similar bound for a model on the fuzzy sphere has been obtained in .

From (19) it is clear that the equality in (20) occurs exactly when the projector $`p`$ satisfies the following self-duality or anti-self duality equations

$$\left[_\mu p\pm iϵ_{\mu \alpha }_\alpha p\right]p=0.$$
(21)
By using the derivations $`,\overline{}`$ , the self duality equation (21) reduce to

$$\overline{}(p)p=0,$$
(22)
while the anti-self duality one is

$$(p)p=0.$$
(23)
Simple manipulations show directly that each of the equations (22) and (23) implies the field equations (17), as it should be.

In the next section, we will partially solve these equations.

### 3.3 The instantons of charge $`1`$.

Before we proceed further, let us be more precise about the connected components of $`𝒫_\theta `$ . The latter are parametrized by two integers $`m`$ and $`n`$ such that $`m+n\theta >0`$. When $`\theta ]0,1[`$ is irrational, the corresponding projectors are exactly the projectors of trace $`m+n\theta `$ and the topological charge $`Q(p)`$ appearing in (18) is just $`n`$. We shall construct our solutions for $`m=0`$ and $`n=1`$ and postpone the general discussion to . Thus we have to find projectors that belongs to the previous homotopy class and satisfy the self-duality equation $`(\overline{}p)p=0`$ or, equivalently, $`pp=0`$.

Although these equations look very simple, they are far from being easy to solve because of their non linear nature. To reduce them to a linear problem, we shall introduce the following material and mimic the original construction of Rieffel  but with the constraint arising from the self-duality equation.

The space $`=𝒮()`$ of Schwarz functions of one variable is made into a right module over $`𝒜_{1/\theta }`$ by defining

$`(\xi V_1)(s)=:\xi (s1/\theta ),`$
$`(\xi V_2)(s)=:e^{2\pi is}\xi (s),`$ (24)
for any $`\xi `$. It is easily checked that this defines an action on the right of the algebra generated by $`V_1`$ and $`V_2`$ and that the latter is isomorphic to $`𝒜_{1/\theta }`$.

Furthermore, $``$ admits also a left action of $`𝒜_\theta `$ given by

$`(U_1\xi )(s)=:\xi (s1),`$
$`(U_2\xi )(s)=:e^{2\pi is\theta }\xi (s).`$ (25)
and one easily proves that the latter commutes with the right action of $`𝒜_{1/\theta }`$. Besides, the elements of $`𝒜_\theta `$ acting on the left are exactly all linear operators from $``$ to itself that commute with the right action of $`𝒜_{1/\theta }`$, namely $`𝒜_\theta \mathrm{End}_{𝒜_{1/\theta }}()`$.

On the module $``$ there is also a $`𝒜_{1/\theta }`$-valued hermitian structure, namely a sesquilinear map (antilinear in the first variable) $`,:\times 𝒜_{1/\theta }`$ which is compatible with the right $`𝒜_{1/\theta }`$-module structure of $``$ (see  for explicit formulae). As a consequence, if $`\xi `$ is such that $`\xi ,\xi `$ is an invertible element of $`𝒜_{1/\theta }`$, the endomorphism

$$p=|\xi \frac{1}{\xi ,\xi }\xi |$$
(26)
is a self-adjoint idempotent (that is a projector) in the algebra $`𝒜_\theta `$ (due to the identification $`𝒜_\theta \mathrm{End}_{𝒜_{1/\theta }}()`$). Here we are using a physicist’s notation for an element $`|\xi `$ and the dual element $`\xi |^{}`$ is defined by means of the hermitian structure as $`\xi |(\eta )=\xi ,\eta 𝒜_{1/\theta }`$ for any $`\eta `$.

In order to translate the self-duality equations for $`p`$ to equations for $`\xi `$, we need to introduce a connection on $``$. This is done  by means of two covariant derivatives explicitly given by $`_1,_2:`$,

$$(_1\xi )(s)=:2\pi i\theta s\xi (s),_2\xi =:\frac{d\xi }{ds},$$
(27)
These two operators fulfill a Leibniz rule with respect to the right action

$$_\mu (\xi a)=(_\mu \xi )a+\xi (_\mu a),\mu =1,2.$$
(28)
for any $`\xi `$ and $`a𝒜_{1/\theta }`$ and $`b𝒜_\theta `$. Furthermore, they are compatible with the hermitian structure in the sense that

$$_\mu \xi ,\eta =_\mu \xi ,\eta +\xi ,_\mu \eta ,\mu =1,2,$$
(29)
for any $`\xi ,\eta `$.

By introducing the operator $`\overline{}=1/2(_1+i_2)`$, it is easy to show that $`p`$ satisfies the self-dual equations (22) if and only if there is an element $`\rho 𝒜_{1/\theta }`$ such that

$$\overline{}\xi =\xi \rho .$$
(30)
Thus, we manage to reduce the self-duality equation to a linear equation for $`\xi `$ that can be easily solved in some simple cases.

When $`\rho `$ is a constant element (i.e. it is proportional to the unit of $`𝒜_{1/\theta },\rho =\lambda \mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}1}`$, with $`\lambda `$), equation (30) reduces to the simple differential equation

$$\frac{d\xi }{dt}+(2\pi \theta t+2i\lambda )\xi =0$$
(31)
whose solutions are the gaussians

$$\xi _\lambda (t)=Ae^{\pi \theta t^22i\lambda t},$$
(32)
and $`A^{}`$ is an inessential normalization parameter.

We will show in  that, at least for $`\theta `$ small enough, the norms $`\xi _\lambda ,\xi _\lambda `$ are invertible. Accordingly, the gaussians (32) provide a two (real) parameter family of solutions $`p_\lambda =|\xi _\lambda (\xi _\lambda ,\xi _\lambda )^1\xi _\lambda |`$ of the self-duality equations (22), and one can show that the freedom we have in $`\lambda `$ just corresponds to the action of the ordinary torus on $`𝒜_\theta `$ by translation. Thus, we interpret the solution as a two dimensional “instanton” in this simple “ noncommutative Ising model” (remember that the target is just made of two points) and the freedom in $`\lambda `$ in a sense corresponds to its location.

However, it is not obvious that different solutions of the self duality equations on $``$, yield different projectors. In fact, $`\xi `$ and $`\xi ^{^{}}`$ provide different projectors if and only if they belong to different orbits of the action of the group of invertible elements of $`𝒜_{1/\theta }`$ that acts on the right on $``$. Obviously, this action preserves the invertibility of $`\xi ,\xi `$ while the structure of the self-duality equation (30) is preserved provided $`\rho `$ is modified according to

$$\rho g^1\rho g+g^1\overline{}g.$$
(33)
In a more physical language, this means that in trading $`p`$ for $`\xi `$ we have introduced spurious gauge degrees of freedom that we must get rid of. In the case of the Gaussians $`\xi _\lambda `$, it is easy to show that $`\xi _\lambda `$ and $`\xi _\lambda ^{^{}}`$ are gauge equivalent if and only if $`\xi _\lambda ^{^{}}=\xi _\lambda U_1^{n_1}U_2^{n_2}`$ where $`n_1`$ and $`n_2`$ are integers. More generally, given a solution $`\xi `$ of the self-dual equation

$$\overline{}\xi \xi \rho =0$$
(34)
with $`\rho 𝒜_{1/\theta }`$, it is not clear that we can find a complex gauge transformation $`g`$ (i.e. an invertible element of $`𝒜_{1/\theta }`$) that allows to gauge transform $`\xi `$ into one of the gaussians. If this were the case, it would mean that we had indeed constructed all self-dual solutions belonging to the corresponding homotopy class. This problem is tantamount to solve the following equation in $`g`$ and $`\lambda `$,

$$\rho =\lambda +g\overline{}g^1.$$
(35)
Again, this can be done if $`\theta `$ is small enough . The corresponding idea is simple: we first notice that the problem is trivial when $`\theta =1/n`$, with $`n^{}`$ because $`𝒜_{1/\theta }`$ is commutative in this case. Indeed, the existence of the gauge transformation results from the Hodge decomposition of 1-forms. Then, we use the implicit function theorem in order to find how to deform the commutative solution, considered as functions of $`\theta `$ .

A few additional remarks are in order. Even if many of the methods we have used are similar to the ones used in the $`CP^N`$ model rather than to the ones pertaining to the Ising model, we refrain from calling these “noncommutative $`CP^N`$ models” since we want to emphasize the fact that our target space in made of two points and is not the manifold $`CP^N`$ (or more general grassmanian manifolds). But obviously the ordinary grassmanian models can also be considered as “noncommutative Ising models” with a source described by matrix valued functions over an ordinary Riemann surface.

It is also worth remarking that we have been working with the Euclidean metric, but all constructions are readily extended to constant metrics whose conformal class are parametrized by a complex number $`\tau `$ in the upper half-plane. Then, the corresponding moduli space turns out to be a complex torus.

## 4 An analogue of the principal chiral model

Apart from finite spaces, the simplest possible target spaces are circles. Ordinary two dimensional field theories compactified on a circle have been extensively studied (see for instance ) and they essentially behave like free fields (with minor deviations). As we shall show in our next example, this is not the case for noncommutative models, the interaction arising from the noncommutative nature of the source.

To proceed, let us first recall that the algebra of function over the circle $`S^1`$ is generated by a unitary element $`U`$. Thus, specifying a $``$-algebra morphism $`\pi `$ from the algebra of functions on the circle to a another $``$-algebra $`𝒜`$ is tantamount to select a unitary element $`g=\pi (U)`$ in $`𝒜`$. Accordingly, our configuration space is made of all unitary elements of $`𝒜`$. For the metric on the circle we shall take the most natural one, $`G=\delta U\delta U^{}`$, while for the target space we take the Euclidean noncommutative torus, extension to other constant metrics being straightforward. Then, the Hochschild cocycle is the one in (15) and our action functional simply reads $`S[g]=\varphi (1,g,g^1)`$, which reduces to

$$S[g]=\frac{1}{2\pi }_\mu g_\mu g^1,$$
(36)
the variables being unitary elements in the algebra of the noncommutative torus $`𝒜_\theta `$.

Our model is analogous to a principal chiral model, with values in a unitary group of matrices with which it shares lots of properties, apart from non-locality. For the time being we shall limit our study to the existence of infinitely many conserved currents.

From the action functional (36), one readily obtain the equations of motion by varying $`gg+\delta g`$. As in the commutative case, they are equivalent to a current conservation

$$_\mu \left(g^1_\mu g\right)=0,$$
(37)
which expresses the invariance under the global $`U(1)`$ symmetry.

To construct infinitely many such currents, we use a standard induction that relies on the Hodge decomposition of differential forms. Since the latter reduce to a simple problem in linear algebra on the noncommutative torus we shall use it without further discussion and write any differential form as a unique sum of a harmonic one (i.e. a constant one), an exact one and a coexact one.

Let us assume that we have constructed the conserved current $`J_\mu ^{(n)}`$ and let us build $`J_\mu ^{(n+1)}`$. Since $`J_\mu ^{(n)}`$ is conserved, the Hodge decomposition just tells that it is a sum of a constant form and a co-exact one. After an incorporation of the possible constant term into $`J_\mu ^{(n)}`$, one can find $`\chi 𝒜_\theta `$ such that

$$J_\mu ^{(n)}=ϵ_{\mu \nu }_\nu \chi ,$$
(38)
where $`ϵ_{\mu \nu }`$ is the standard antisymmetric tensor. Then, let us introduce the gauge field $`A_\mu =g^1_\mu g`$ and the covariant derivative $`D_\mu =_\mu +A_\mu `$. We define the next current as

$$J_\mu ^{(n+1)}=D_\mu \chi .$$
(39)
It is easy to check that it is conserved, owing to the easily verified commutation rules $`[_\mu ,D_\mu ]=0`$ and $`[D_\mu ,D_\nu ]=0`$. Starting with $`J_\mu ^{(1)}=g^1_\mu g`$, by repeating the construction we can construct an infinite number of non local conserved currents.

Of course the series of new currents would stop whenever there appears a constant current. With some more work one can show that this does not happen unless one starts with a trivial solution of the equations of motion which is a product of the generators. One could also object that non trivial solutions of the equations of motion may not exist. Again this is not the case, since one can take $`g=2p1`$, where $`p`$ is one of the instantonic solutions we constructed in the previous section.

All previous construction is very elementary and follows directly from the ordinary field theoretical construction of the currents. The only point we want to emphasize is that the latter still works in noncommutative geometry. A more thorough survey of our theory along the classical lines  will be given in , including a generalization of unitons.

## 5 Addition of the Wess-Zumino term

Although the previous considerations are purely classical, the models can be quantized. This amounts to define and compute the partition function

$$𝒵=[𝒟g]e^{S[g]},$$
(40)
together with the correlation functions

$$gg\mathrm{}g=\frac{1}{𝒵}[𝒟g](gg\mathrm{}g)e^{S[g]},$$
(41)
as well as possible insertions of composite operators. Of course, none of these functional integrals are well defined and to give a precise meaning to them, one has to set up the renormalization procedure which yields some non trivial problems even in dimension two, these models being power counting renormalizable only in that dimension.

However, as far as the one-loop level is considered, this is easily achieved within the background field method. As its non-abelian cousins, our model exhibits a negative $`\beta `$ function so that one may say that it is asymptotically free. Accordingly, one can definitely exclude the possibility of having a free field theory.

We shall see that, after addition of the so called “Wess-Zumino term”, the model behaves almost like a free field (see, for instance,  and  for recent pedagogical reviews of the ordinary WZW model). Once again, we will only be sketchy because of lack of space, and refer to  for a detailed account.

To construct the Wess-Zumino term, let us start with a given unitary element $`g`$ of $`𝒜_\theta `$. It is known from K-theory  that there always exist a curve $`g_t,t[0,1]`$ in the group of unitary elements of $`𝒜_\theta `$ that fulfills $`g_1=g`$ and $`g_0=(U_1)^{n_1}(U_2)^{n_2}`$, where $`(n_1,n_2)`$ denotes the class of $`g`$ in K$`{}_{1}{}^{}(𝒜_\theta )`$. Therefore, we can define the Wess-Zumino term as

$$S_{WZ}[g]=\frac{ik}{4\pi }ϵ^{\mu \nu }_0^1𝑑tg_t^1\frac{dg_t}{dt}_\mu g_t^1g_t,$$
(42)
where $`k`$ is an a priori arbitrary real number. As in the classical case, this term can be expressed as the integral over a solid noncommutative torus, but the latter depends on the class of $`g`$ in K-theory, different classes yielding isomorphic and cobordant solid tori.

Although the model (42) depends on the curve $`g_t`$ and not only on $`g`$ one can show that, given any other curve $`\stackrel{~}{g}_t`$ connecting the same boundaries, the difference of the two Wess-Zumino terms can be expressed as an integral over a loop in the group of unitary elements of $`𝒜_\theta `$. Such a quantity may be easily identified with a coupling of a 3-cyclic cocycle with a unitary element of $`C^{\mathrm{}}(S^1)𝒜_\theta `$ and it can be shown to be proportional to an integer, as follows from a straightforward application of the index theorem (see  for a very elementary treatment). It turns out that if $`k`$, the Wess-Zumino term is defined up to integral multiples of $`2i\pi `$.

Accordingly, we construct the Wess-Zumino-Witten action just by adding the previous term to the non-linear $`\sigma `$-model and we get,

$$S_{WZW}[g]=\frac{k}{8\pi }_\mu g\mu g^1+\frac{ik}{4\pi }ϵ^{\mu \nu }_0^1𝑑tg_t^1\frac{dg_t}{dt}_\mu g_t^1g_t,$$
(43)
for positive $`k`$.

By introducing the usual operators $``$ and $`\overline{}`$, algebraic manipulations involving integrations by part show that a Polyakov-Wiegman identity holds, namely

$$S_{WZ}[gh]=S_{WZ}[g]+S_{WZ}[h]+\frac{1}{4i\pi }g^1\overline{}ghh^1.$$
(44)
When $`h=1+g^1\delta g`$, this identity allows one to write the variation of $`S_{WZW}[g]`$ as

$$\delta S_{WZW}[g]=\frac{k}{2i\pi }g^1\delta g\left(g^1\overline{}g\right).$$
(45)
Then, the equations of motion can be written equivalently as

$$\overline{J}=0,\mathrm{or}\overline{}J=0,$$
(46)
with $`\overline{J}=g^1\overline{}g`$ and $`J=gg^1`$.

One readily sees that there are very few solutions of the previous equation, since any holomorphic function on the noncommutative torus, defined as an element of the algebra in the kernel of $`\overline{}`$, is constant.

In order to get non trivial solutions, we equip the torus with the Minkowski metric. Then the equations of motion are

$$_+\left(g^1_{}g\right)=0,$$
(47)
with $`_\pm =_1_2`$. Apart from products of the generators $`U_1`$ and $`U_2`$, we will show that the general solution of equations (47) can be factorized as

$$g=g_+g_{},$$
(48)
where $`g_\pm `$ are unitary elements of $`𝒜_\theta `$ satisfying the equations $`_{}g_\pm =0`$.

To proceed, let us first assume that $`g`$ belongs to the connected component of the identity. If this is not the case, we multiply it by a suitable product of the generators, given by the class of $`g`$ in K-theory (the result is still a solution of the equation of motion). Now, it follows from the equation (47) that $`J_{}=g^1_{}g`$ belongs to the kernel of $`_+`$ so that it can be expanded as a Laurent series in $`U_1U_2^1`$. Besides, since we are assuming that $`g`$ belongs to the connected component of the identity, the constant mode of the expansion vanishes, since it is invariant under deformation of $`g`$. Therefore, the primitive

$$_{}J_{}$$
(49)
is well defined (one simply has to divide the coefficient in front of any monomial by the corresponding non vanishing power). As a consequence, the solutions of the remaining equation

$$_{}g=gJ_{}$$
(50)
are easily expressed as

$$g=g_+e^_{}J_{}$$
(51)
with $`g_+`$ an arbitrary unitary element of the algebra of Laurent series in $`U_1U_2`$. Thus, $`g_\pm `$ can be expanded as

$$g_\pm =\underset{n}{}g_\pm ^{(n)}\left(U_1U_2^{\pm 1}\right)^n,$$
(52)
and both can be interpreted as maps from circles $`S_\pm ^1`$, which are the spaces of characters of the commutative algebras generated by $`U_1U_2^{\pm 1}`$, to $`U(1)`$. Note however that the coordinates on $`S_+^1`$ do not commute with the ones on $`S_{}^1`$.

Although this model almost looks like a free field theory, with commutative left and right movers, the standard parity symmetry that exchanges left and right has been broken and the theory, due to noncommutativity, always remembers that left movers must appear on the left. Alternatively, this may be understood as a lack of invariance of the Wess-Zumino term under the inversion $`gg^1`$, while the kinetic term obviously enjoys this symmetry. From the strict point of view of solving the equation of motion, this is the only remainder of the noncommutative nature of the source space.

Obviously, the space of solutions of the equations of motion is invariant under gauge symmetry (respective multiplication on the left and the right by left and right moving unitaries) and under conformal symmetry (reparametrisation of $`S^\pm `$). However, general conformal transformations are not symmetries of the noncommutative torus in the sense that they do not correspond to automorphisms of the algebra $`𝒜_\theta `$; it is only the translations that can be lifted to automorphisms. Therefore, there is no a priori satisfactory way to define conformal transformations of $`g`$ when it is not a solution of the equations of motion. Note that gauge transformation do not create any trouble since they correspond to inner automorphisms of the algebra.

Fortunately, one can construct analogues of conformal transformations that do leave the action invariant and reduce both on-shell and in the commutative case to ordinary conformal transformations. To proceed, let us introduce the (not necessarily conserved) left and right currents $`J_\pm `$, analogous of $`J`$ and $`\overline{J}`$. Furthermore, let us introduce infinitesimal multiplets $`ϵ_\pm =(ϵ_\pm ^{(1)},\mathrm{},ϵ_\pm ^{(n)})`$ of left and right moving elements of $`𝒜_\theta `$. then, we define the infinitesimal transformations $`\delta _{ϵ_\pm }(g)`$ as

$$\delta _ϵ_{}(g)=g\left(\underset{\mathrm{permutations}}{}ϵ_{}^{(i_1)}J_{}ϵ_{}^{(i_2)}J_{}\mathrm{}ϵ_{}^{(i_{n1})}J_{}ϵ_{}^{(i_n)}\right)$$
(53)
and

$$\delta _{ϵ_+}(g)=\left(\underset{\mathrm{permutations}}{}ϵ_+^{(i_1)}J_+ϵ_+^{(i_2)}J_+\mathrm{}ϵ_+^{(i_{n1})}J_+ϵ_+^{(i_n)}\right)g,$$
(54)
with the sums running over all permutations of the indices $`i_1,\mathrm{},i_n`$.

One readily sees that, by replacing $`\delta g`$ with $`\delta _{ϵ_\pm }(g)`$ in the variation of the Wess-Zumino-Witten action, one gets the integral of a total derivative. Thus the variation vanishes even if $`g`$ is not a solution of the equation of motion.

For the particular $`n=1`$ case, the previous transformations reduce to gauge transformations. On shell or in the commutative case, the $`n=2`$ transformations are just the conformal ones. The case $`n>2`$ is more exotic, since two such transformations acting on the left and on the right do not in general commute. Furthermore, it is not clear whether these transformations close off-shell or not. Probably the closure of this algebra requires more general transformations. For instance, $`[\delta _{ϵ_+},\delta _ϵ_{}]`$ is a new symmetry that one has to introduce into the algebra. In the same vein, one also introduces transformations involving the derivatives of the currents. All these transformations are of the form

$$\delta _{ϵ_{},ϵ_+}(g)=gK_{}(ϵ_{},J_{})+K_+(ϵ_+,J_+)g,$$
(55)
where $`K_\pm (ϵ_\pm ,J_\pm )`$ are suitable products of the currents, their derivatives and the corresponding parameters $`ϵ_\pm `$.

Whether this procedure ends or not is not so clear since any computation is rather intricate due to the transformation of the currents themselves. One can also note that the $`n>2`$ case will not yield symmetries of the ordinary $`SU(N)`$ non-abelian Wess-Zumino-Witten theory (apart from the $`SU(2)`$ case), since it does not preserve the unimodular condition of $`SU(N)`$, but they are bona fide transformations for fields with values in $`U(N)`$.

As a final remark, we mention that we have constructed the Wess-Zumino term associated with a particular cyclic cocycle of the noncommutative torus. But the procedure is general and given any $`2n`$-cyclic cocycle on an algebra $`𝒜`$ one can construct the associated Wess-Zumino term in a similar way. Furthermore, the ambiguity in the definition will still be measured by the coupling of a $`2n+1`$-cyclic cocycle with an element of $`K_1(C(S^1)𝒜)`$. This Wess-Zumino term may be added to the action of a principal chiral field, constructed with a Hochschild cocycle. In two dimensions, an analogue of the Polyakov-Wiegman identity still holds provided one uses a suitable scalar product in the LHS.

As a simple example, one can take the matrix algebra $`𝒜=M_n()`$ and the cyclic cocycle given by the trace. Then, for any unitary matrix $`g`$, it is easy to show that $`S_{WZ}[g]=k\mathrm{log}detg`$. In this very simple case, the ambiguity in defining the Wess-Zumino term is nothing but the ambiguity one encounters when defining the argument of a complex number of modulus one, which is arbitrary up to $`2i\pi `$. Furthermore, the Polyakov-Wiegman identity (we drop the kinetic term in this example) reduces to the statement that the argument of a product is the sum of the argument of its factors, up to $`2i\pi `$.

We end here our sketchy discussion of the classical aspects of the noncommutative Wess-Zumino-Witten model. We are aware that many interesting questions have been left aside. In our opinion the main question is to understand how far from a free field theory our model stands.

Finally, we mention that actions analogous to ours have been obtained in  and .