Locally covariant quantum field theory with external sources
Christopher J. Fewster, Alexander Schenkel
February 11, 2014
We provide a detailed analysis of the classical and quantized theory of a
multiplet of inhomogeneous Klein-Gordon fields, which couple to the spacetime
metric and also to an external source term; thus the solutions form an affine
space. Following the formulation of affine field theories in terms of
presymplectic vector spaces as proposed in [Annales Henri Poincare 15, 171
(2014)], we determine the relative Cauchy evolution induced by metric as well
as source term perturbations and compute the automorphism group of natural
isomorphisms of the presymplectic vector space functor. Two pathological
features of this formulation are revealed: the automorphism group contains
elements that cannot be interpreted as global gauge transformations of the
theory; moreover, the presymplectic formulation does not respect a natural
requirement on composition of subsystems. We therefore propose a systematic
strategy to improve the original description of affine field theories at the
classical and quantized level, first passing to a Poisson algebra description
in the classical case. The idea is to consider state spaces on the classical
and quantum algebras suggested by the physics of the theory (in the classical
case, we use the affine solution space). The state spaces are not separating
for the algebras, indicating a redundancy in the description. Removing this
redundancy by a quotient, a functorial theory is obtained that is free of the
above mentioned pathologies. These techniques are applicable to general affine
field theories and Abelian gauge theories. The resulting quantized theory is
shown to be dynamically local.
Keywords:
locally covariant quantum field theory, relative Cauchy evolution, dynamical locality, quantum field theory on curved spacetimes, affine quantum field theory