Thomas-Paul Hack

The extended algebra of observables for Dirac fields and the trace anomaly of their stress-energy tensor

We discuss from scratch the classical structure of Dirac spinors on an arbitrary globally hyperbolic, Lorentzian spacetime, their formulation as a locally covariant quantum field theory, and the associated notion of a Hadamard state. Eventually, we develop the notion of Wick polynomials for spinor fields, and we employ the latter to construct a covariantly conserved stress-energy tensor suited for back-reaction computations. We shall explicitly calculate its trace anomaly in particular.

QUANTUM FIELD THEORY ON CURVED BACKGROUNDS — A PRIMER

Goal of this paper is to introduce the algebraic approach to quantum field theory on curved backgrounds. Based on a set of axioms, first written down by Haag and Kastler, this method consists of a two-step procedure. In the first one, it is assigned to a physical system a suitable algebra of observables, which is meant to encode all algebraic relations among observables, such as commutation relations. In the second step, one must select an algebraic state in order to recover the standard Hilbert space interpretation of a quantum system. As quantum field theories possess infinitely many degrees of freedom, many unitarily inequivalent Hilbert space representations exist and the power of such approach is the ability to treat them all in a coherent manner. We will discuss in detail the algebraic approach for free fields in order to give the reader all necessary information to deal with the recent literature, which focuses on the applications to specific problems, mostly in cosmology.

Linear bosonic and fermionic quantum gauge theories on curved spacetimes

We develop a general setting for the quantization of linear bosonic and fermionic field theories subject to local gauge invariance and show how standard examples such as linearised Yang-Mills theory and linearised general relativity fit into this framework. Our construction always leads to a well-defined and gauge-invariant quantum field algebra, the centre and representations of this algebra, however, have to be analysed on a case-by-case basis. We discuss an example of a fermionic gauge field theory where the necessary conditions for the existence of Hilbert space representations are not met on any spacetime. On the other hand, we prove that these conditions are met for the Rarita-Schwinger gauge field in linearised pure

On the Stress-Energy Tensor of Quantum Fields in Curved Spacetimes - Comparison of Different Regularization Schemes and Symmetry of the Hadamard/Seeley-DeWitt Coefficients

N=1

A no-go theorem for the consistent quantization of spin-3/2 fields on general curved spacetimes

supergravity on certain spacetimes, including asymptotically flat spacetimes and classes of spacetimes with compact Cauchy surfaces. We also present an explicit example of a supergravity background on which the Rarita-Schwinger gauge field can not be consistently quantized.

An analytic regularisation scheme on curved space–times with applications to cosmological space–times

The aim of this work is to complete our program on the quantization of connections on arbitrary principal U(1)-bundles over globally hyperbolic Lorentzian manifolds. In particular, we show that one can assign via a covariant functor to any such bundle an algebra of observables which separates gauge equivalence classes of connections. The C*-algebra we construct generalizes the usual CCR-algebras, since, contrary to the standard field-theoretic models, it is based on a presymplectic Abelian group instead of a symplectic vector space. We prove a no-go theorem according to which neither this functor, nor any of its quotients, satisfies the strict axioms of general local covariance. As a byproduct, we prove that a morphism violates the locality axiom if and only if a certain induced morphism of cohomology groups is non-injective. We show then that, fixing any principal U(1)-bundle, there exists a suitable category of subbundles for which a quotient of our functor yields a quantum field theory in the sense of Haag and Kastler. We shall provide a physical interpretation of this feature and we obtain some new insights concerning electric charges in locally covariant quantum field theory.

Cosmological Applications of Algebraic Quantum Field Theory

We review a few rigorous and partly unpublished results on the regularisation of the stress-energy in quantum field theory on curved spacetimes: 1) the symmetry of the Hadamard/Seeley-DeWitt coefficients in smooth Riemannian a Lorentzian spacetimes 2) the equivalence of the local �-function and the Hadamard-point-splitting procedure in smooth static spacetimes 3) the equivalence of the DeWitt-Schwinger- and the Hadamard-point-splitting pro- cedure in smooth Riemannian and Lorentzian spacetimes.

Quantum field theory on curved spacetime and the standard cosmological model

The principle of perturbative agreement, as introduced by Hollands and Wald, is a renormalization condition in quantum field theory on curved spacetimes. This principle states that the perturbative and exact constructions of a field theoretic model given by the sum of a free and an exactly tractable interaction Lagrangian should agree. We develop a proof of the validity of this principle in the case of scalar fields and quadratic interactions without derivatives, which differs in strategy from the one given by Hollands and Wald for the case of quadratic interactions encoding a change of metric. Thereby, we profit from the observation that, in the case of quadratic interactions, the composition of the inverse classical Møller map and the quantum Møller map is a contraction exponential of a particular type. Afterwards, we prove a generalisation of the principle of perturbative agreement and show that considering an arbitrary quadratic contribution of a general interaction either as part of the free theory or as part of the perturbation gives equivalent results. Motivated by the thermal mass idea, we use our findings to extend the construction of massive interacting thermal equilibrium states in Minkowski spacetime developed by Fredenhagen and Lindner to the massless case. In passing, we also prove a property of the construction of Fredenhagen and Lindner which was conjectured by these authors.