# Tagged Questions

1answer
194 views

### Clarification on “central charge equals number of degrees of freedom”

It's often stated that the central charge c of a CFT counts the degrees of freedom: it adds up when stacking different fields, decreases as you integrate out UV dof from one fixed point to another, ...
3answers
122 views

### Is BRST ghost number conserved in quantum gravity?

Quantum gravity needs Faddeev-Popov ghosts. Feynman showed that. Take a black hole. Hawking pair production of ghost-antighost pair. One ghost falls into the hole and hits the singularity. The ghost ...
2answers
404 views

### What is the ontological status of Faddeev Popov ghosts?

We all know Faddeev-Popov ghosts are needed in manifestly Lorentz covariant nonabelian quantum gauge theories. We also all know they decouple from the rest of matter asymptotically, although they ...
1answer
112 views

### Who added $\frac{3}{2} \partial^2 c$ to the virasoro BRST current (and why)?

I've been looking at the literature on quantizing the bosonic string, and I noticed that there was a change made in the definition of the BRST current around 1992. However, I haven't found any ...
2answers
130 views

### Is ghost-number a physical reality/observable?

One perspective is to say that one introduced the ghost fields into the Lagrangian to be able to write the gauge transformation determinant as a path-integral. Hence I was tempted to think of them as ...
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