[Math] Mathematics of path integral: state of the art

big-picturepath-integralquantum-field-theorysoft-question

I was told that one of the most efficient tools (e.g. in terms of computations relevant to physics, but also in terms of guessing heuristically mathematical facts) that physicists use is the so called "Feynman path integral", which, as far as I understand, means "integrating" a functional (action) on some infinite-dimentional space of configurations (fields) of a system.

Unfortunately, it seems that, except for some few instances like Gaussian-type integrals, the quotation marks cannot be eliminated in the term "integration", cause a mathematically sound integration theory on infinite-dimensional spaces — I was told — has not been invented yet.

I would like to know the state of the art of the attempts to make this "path integral" into a well-defined mathematical entity.

Difficulties of analytical nature are certainly present, but I read somewhere that perhaps the true nature of path integral would be hidden in some combinatorial or higher-categorical structures which are not yet understood…

Edit: I should be more precise about the kind of answer that I expected to this question. I was not asking about reference for books/articles in which the path integral is treated at length and in detail. I'd have just liked to have some "fresh", (relatively) concise and not too-specialistic account of the situation; something like: "Essentially the problems are due to this and this, and there have been approaches X, Y, Z that focus on A, B, C; some progress have been made in … but problems remain in …".

Best Answer

It's not accurate to say that no theory of integration on infinite-dimensional spaces exists. The Euclidean-signature Feynman measure has been constructed -- as a measure on a space of distributions -- in a number of non-trivial cases, mainly by the Constructive QFT school in the 70s.

The mathematical constructions reflect the physical ideas of effective quantum field theory: One obtains the measure on the space of field histories as the limit of a sequence/net of "regularized" integrals, which encode how the effective "long distance" degrees of freedom interact with each other after one averages out the short distance degrees of freedom in various ways. (You can imagine here that long/short distance refers to some wavelet basis, and that we get the sequence of regularized integrals by varying the way we divide the wavelet basis into short distance and long distance components.)

I don't think the main problem in the subject is that we need some new notion of integration. The Feynman measures we mathematicians can construct exhibit all the richness of the "higher categories" axioms, and moreover, the numerical computations in lattice gauge theory and in statistical physics indicates that the existing framework is at the least a very good approximation.

The problem, rather, is that we need a better way of constructing examples. At the moment, you have to guess which family of regularized integrals you ought to study when you try to construct any particular example. (In Glimm & Jaffe's book, for example, they simply replace the interaction Lagrangian with the corresponding "normally ordered" Lagrangian. In lattice gauge theory, they use short-distance continuum perturbation theory to figure out what the lattice action should be.)

Then -- and this is the really hard and physically interesting part -- you have to have enough analytic control on the family to say which observables (functions on the space of distributions) are integrable with respect to the limiting continuum measure. This is where you earn the million dollars, so to speak.