Does it make sense to say that the processes represented by Feynman diagrams and path integrals (like beta decay) are “real?” If you want to say in what sense they are or are not real, please respond!
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Fun fact: Feynman diagrams are not confined to qft, but work as well in classical field theories like electrodynamics. But there there is a lot less confusion on what is real and what is not
TL;DR no, what is real is the sum of all the terms in the perturbative expansion.
There’s a nice stack exchange post out there somewhere about “does every perturbation series have ‘Feynman’ diagrams “
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One big discovery in the 1990s was that Feynman diagrams are pictures of morphisms in monoidal categories - and the things you could do with this fact. So, all Feynman-diagram-like descriptions of perturbation series should be interesting to mathematicians.
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Never thought about it in these terms, but (as far as I understand) you get Feynman diagrams any time you can write a Born series for the Green function. Is this the same as saying you get them for every perturbation series? (Gut feeling is yes)
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