The Disordered Universe 2025: Open Effective Field Theories
Abstract
Effective field theories (EFTs) offer a powerful method to unify diverse models under a small set of control parameters, allowing systematic expansions around well-established theories. While these techniques were traditionally developed for particle physics experiments with clean, isolated initial states, realistic macroscopic environments are often noisy and dissipative. Recognising the limitations of traditional EFTs has recently sparked intense progress at the interface of high-energy physics and condensed matter. These developments motivate a new approach to gravitation and cosmology, one that models the gravitational sector as evolving in the presence of an unobservable medium. Open Effective Field Theories provide a systematic, controllable framework for this endeavour. This chapter presents this versatile framework and illustrates how the Schwinger-Keldysh formalism captures the influence of unknown environments, manifesting as dissipation and noise, on observational probes. These notes are based on a series of lectures held during the La Ricotta Summer School "The Disordered Universe 2025" from 21 July to 1 August 2025.
Related
- Exact effective central charges for a family of 3d superconformal field theories
- General relativity and its modifications as effective field theories of GL(4) breaking
- Gravitational Faraday rotation, gravitational spin Hall effect, and spin-refined causality analysis from Magnusian matrix in effective field theories of gravity
- All-Order Helicity Selection Rules in Effective Field Theories
- How to Identify a Majoron: Effective Field Theories of Spontaneous Lepton Number Breaking
BibTeX
@misc{fumagalli2026disordered,
title = {{The Disordered Universe 2025: Open Effective Field Theories}},
author = {Alessandro Fumagalli and Francesco Paronetto and Leonardo Stanzani and Mattia Varrone and Lucas Vicente García-Consuegra and Thomas Colas and Paolo Benincasa and Guilherme Leite Pimentel},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.36898},
eprint = {2610.36898},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36898},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - The Disordered Universe 2025: Open Effective Field Theories
AU - Alessandro Fumagalli
AU - Francesco Paronetto
AU - Leonardo Stanzani
AU - Mattia Varrone
AU - Lucas Vicente García-Consuegra
AU - Thomas Colas
AU - Paolo Benincasa
AU - Guilherme Leite Pimentel
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/27
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.36898
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36898
AB - Effective field theories (EFTs) offer a powerful method to unify diverse models under a small set of control parameters, allowing systematic expansions around well-established theories. While these techniques were traditionally developed for particle physics experiments with clean, isolated initial states, realistic macroscopic environments are often noisy and dissipative. Recognising the limitations of traditional EFTs has recently sparked intense progress at the interface of high-energy physics and condensed matter. These developments motivate a new approach to gravitation and cosmology, one that models the gravitational sector as evolving in the presence of an unobservable medium. Open Effective Field Theories provide a systematic, controllable framework for this endeavour. This chapter presents this versatile framework and illustrates how the Schwinger-Keldysh formalism captures the influence of unknown environments, manifesting as dissipation and noise, on observational probes. These notes are based on a series of lectures held during the La Ricotta Summer School "The Disordered Universe 2025" from 21 July to 1 August 2025.
ER -