Short Distance Properties from Large Distance Behaviour

Abstract

For slowly varying fields the vacuum functional of a quantum field theory may be expanded in terms of local functionals. This expansion satisfies its own form of the Schrödinger equation from which the expansion coefficents can be found. For scalar field theory in 1+1 dimensions we show that this approach correctly reproduces the short-distance properties as contained in the counter-terms. We also describe an approximate simplification that occurs for the Sine-Gordon and Sinh-Gordon vacuum functionals.