A worldline approach to colored particles

Understand

Relativistic particle actions are a useful tool to describe quantum field theory effective actions using a string-inspired first-quantized approach.

• Here we describe how to employ suitable particle actions in the computation of the scalar contribution to the one-loop gluon effective action.
• We use the well-known method of introducing auxiliary variables that create the color degrees of freedom.
• In a path integral they implement automatically the path ordering needed to ensure gauge invariance.