Application of the Worldline Path Integral Method to the Calculation of Inverse Mass Expansions

TL;DR

This paper develops a method using the worldline path integral to compute higher order coefficients in the inverse mass expansion of one-loop effective actions, providing explicit results up to order T^5.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of the worldline path integral method to calculate inverse mass expansion coefficients with explicit higher order terms.

Findings

Explicit results for coefficients up to order T^5 in the inverse mass expansion.

Application to scalar loops in backgrounds with scalar potential and non-Abelian gauge fields.

Demonstrates the effectiveness of the worldline approach for higher order calculations.

Abstract

Higher order coefficients of the inverse mass expansion of one-loop effective actions are obtained from a one-dimensional path integral representation. For the case of a massive scalar loop in the background of both a scalar potential and a (non Abelian) gauge field explicit results to $O(T^5)$ in the proper time parameter are presented.