Collective field theory of gauged multi-matrix models: Integrating out off-diagonal strings

Abstract: We study a two-matrix toy model with a BFSS-like interaction term using the collective field formalism. The main technical simplification is obtained by gauge-fixing first, and integrating out the off-diagonal elements, before changing to the collective field variable. We show that the resulting (2+1)-dimensional collective field action has novel features with respect to non-locality, and that we need to add a mass term to get a time-local potential. As is expected, one recovers the single matrix quantum mechanical collective field Hamiltonian in the proper limit.