Publication
We consider the field theory that defines a perfect incompressible 2D fluid. One distinctive property of this system is that the quadratic action for fluctuations around the ground state features neither mass nor gradient term. Quantum mechanically this poses a technical puzzle, as it implies the Hilbert space of fluctuations is not a Fock space and perturbation theory is useless. As we show, the proper treatment must instead use that the configuration space is the area preserving Lie group SDiff. Quantum mechanics on Lie groups is basically a group theory problem, but a harder one in our case, since SDiff is infinite dimensional. Focusing on a fluid on the 2-torus T2, we could however exploit the well known result SDiff(T2) ∼ SU(N) for N → ∞, reducing for finite N to a tractable case. SU(N) offers a UV-regulation, but physical quantities can be robustly defined in the continuum limit N → ∞. The main result of our study is the existence of ungapped localized excitations, the vortons, satisfying a dispersion ω ∝ k2 and carrying a vorticity dipole. The vortons are also characterized by very distinctive derivative interactions whose structure is fixed by symmetry. Departing from the original incompressible fluid, we constructed a class of field theories where the vortons appear, right from the start, as the quanta of either bosonic or fermionic local fields.