Homotopical Computations in Quantum Fields Theory

Abstract: This paper is a mathematical study of quantum correlation functions in quantum field theory within a homotopy algebraic framework motivated from the BV quantization scheme. We characterize quantum correlation functions by algebraic homotopy theoretical methods which circumvent gauge fixing and perturbative Feynman diagrams. We show that there is a universal algebraic structure, closely related with that of the WDVV equation, governing quantum correlation functions of every quantum field theory in our framework up to a certain ambiguity. The algebraic structure is independent of the details of the quantum expectation, other than its existence with the prescribed symmetry, and comes with a concrete algorithm for explicit computations. We will also make proposals for the precise natures of quantum expectation and physical equivalence of quantum field theories.