The renormalized locally covariant Dirac field

Abstract

The definition of the locally covariant Dirac field is adapted such that it may be charged under a gauge group and in the presence of generic gauge and Yukawa background fields. We construct renormalized Wick powers and time-ordered products. It is shown that the Wick powers may be defined such that the current and the stress-energy tensor are conserved, and the remaining ambiguity is characterized. We sketch a variant of the background field method that can be used to determine the renormalization group flow at the one loop level from the nontrivial scaling of Wick powers.

40 pages. v2: Corrections is Sections 4.1 and 4.2. v3: Section 3.1 reworked, final version