We develop a quantisation scheme for Maxwell's equations without source on an oriented 4-dimensional globally hyperbolic spacetime with at most finitely many connected components. The field strength tensor is the key dynamical object and it is not assumed a priori that it descends from a vector potential. It is shown that, in general, the associated field algebra can contain a non trivial centre and, on account of this, such a theory cannot be described within the framework of general local covariance unless further restrictive assumptions on the topology of the spacetime are made. * current address:
We consider the quantised free Dirac field on oriented and globally hyperbolic ultrastatic slab spacetimes with compact spatial section and demonstrate how a gauge invariant, pure and quasifree state on the C*-completion of the self-dual CAR-algebra can be extracted from the fermionic projector construction of Finster and Reintjes. This state is analogous to the 'SJ-state' of the free scalar field recently discussed in the literature. We prove that this state generically fails to be Hadamard. However, we also show how a modified version of the construction, inspired by work of Brum and Fredenhagen, yields states which are Hadamard. We also relate the Hadamard condition to the finiteness of fluctuations of Wick polynomials. * chris.fewster@york.ac.uk † bl620@york.ac.uk arXiv:1408.1645v2 [math-ph]
Abstract:We consider the non-interacting source-free Maxwell field, described both in terms of the vector potential and the field strength. Starting from the classical field theory on contractible globally hyperbolic spacetimes, we extend the classical field theory to general globally hyperbolic spacetimes in two ways to obtain a 'universal' theory and a 'reduced' theory. The quantum field theory in terms of the unital * -algebra of the smeared quantum field is then obtained by an application of a suitable quantisation functor. We show that the universal theories fail local covariance and dynamical locality owing to the possibility of having non-trivial radicals in the classical and non-trivial centres in the quantum case. The reduced theories are both locally covariant and dynamically local. These models provide new examples relevant to the discussion of how theories should be formulated so as to describe the same physics in all spacetimes.
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