I am coming back to you with a new format: Questions. Let me start with two questions I have been thinking about recently but that I don't know a good answer to.
't Hooft limit of classical field equations
The 't Hooft limit leads to important simplifications in perturbative QFT and is used for many discoveries around AdS/CFT, N=4 super YM, amplitudes etc etc. You can take it in its original form for SU(N) gauge theory where its inventor realized you can treat N as a parameter of the theory and when you do perturbation theory you can do so in terms of ribbon Feynman diagrams. Then a standard analysis in terms of Euler's polyhedron theorem (discrete version of the Gauss-Bonnet-theorem) shows that genus g diagrams come with a factor 1/N^g such that at leading order for large N only the planar diagrams survive.
The argument generalizes to all kinds of theories with matrix valued fields where the action can be written as a single trace. In a similar vain, it also has a version for non-commutative theories on the Moyal plane.
My question is now if there is a classical analogue of this simplification. Let's talk the classical equations of motion for SU(N) YM or any of the other theories, maybe something as simple as
d^2/dt^2 M = M^3 for NxN matrices M. Can we say anything about simplifications of taking the large N limit? Of course you can use tree level Feynman diagrams to solve those equations perturbatively (as for example I described here), but is there a non-perturbative version of "planar"?
Can I say anything about the structure of solutions to these equations that is approached for N->infinity?
Path Integral Entanglement
Entanglement is the distinguishing feature of quantum theory as compared to classical physics. It is closely tied to the non-comutativity of the observable algebra and is responsible for things like the violation of Bell's inequality.
On the other hand, we know that the path integral gives us an equivalent description of quantum physics, surprisingly in terms of configurations/paths of the classical variables (that we then have to take the weighted integral over) which are intrinsically commuting objects.
Properties of non-commuting operators can appear in subtle ways, like the operator ordering ambiguity how to quantize the classical observable x^2p^2, should it be xp^2x or px^2p or for example (x^2p^2 + p^2x^2)/2? This is a true quantization ambiguity and the path integral has to know about it as well. It turns out, it does: When you show the equivalence of Schroedinger's equation and the path integral, you do that by considering infinitesimal paths and you have to evaluate potentials etc on some point of those paths to compute things like V(x) in the action. Turns out, the operator ambiguity is equivalent to choosing where to evaluate V(x), at the start of the path, the end, the middle or somewhere else.
So far so good. The question that I don't know the answer to is how the path integral encodes entanglement. For example can you discuss a version of Bell's inequality (or similar like GHZ) in the path integral language? Of course you would have to translate the spin operators to positions .
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