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+1 vote

I am trying to use a replacement rule which inserts a minus sign in front of an operator depending on one of its index. However, I don't manage to do anything and I don't understand what could be the correct syntax.

For giving some context, I want to implement BPZ conjugation of operators in a 2d CFT (for string theory).

Here is my code:

bpzrl := {
    \alpha_{n}^{\mu} -> - (-1)**{n} \alpha_{- n}^{\mu}
};

def bpz(ex):
    distribute(ex)
    substitute(ex, bpzrl)
    sort_product(ex)
    return ex

XX := \alpha_{1}^{\mu}.
bpz(XX);

and the output : $$- \alpha_{-1}^\mu -1^1$$

in General questions by (260 points)

1 Answer

+2 votes
 
Best answer

It's doing the correct thing to the expression, but the result is not written in canonical form, and because of that displays incorrectly. What it's actually showing is

- \alpha_{-1}^{\mu} { -1 }^{1}

and because the curly brackets around the -1 do not show, you get this weird looking result.

The quickest way to fix this is to add an

expand_power(ex)

inside your bpz function; that will turn (-1)^1 into (-1) which then gets absorbed into product correctly. Using simplify(ex) will also work, but is much slower and requires a roundtrip through sympy's simplify function.

It's a bug of course, I have registered it as https://github.com/kpeeters/cadabra2/issues/247.

by (82.5k points)
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Thanks a lot, this works perfectly!

I am discovering Cadabra and it's really amazing, thanks for creating it!

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