Gluing. Part I. Integrals and symmetries

Abstract

We review some aspects of the cutting and gluing law in local quantum field theory (QFT) and study it from a new point of view. In particular, we emphasize the description of gluing by a path integral over a space of polarized boundary conditions, which are given by leaves of some Lagrangian foliation in the phase space. We think of this path integral as a non-local (d – 1)-dimensional gluing theory associated to the parent local d-dimensional QFT. This is a novel point of view paving the way for applications of the standard QFT techniques (that do not rely on locality) to the gluing theory. We describe various properties of this procedure and spell out conditions under which symmetries of the parent theory lead to symmetries of the gluing theory. The purpose of this paper is to set up a playground for the companion paper where these techniques are applied to obtain new results in supersymmetric theories.