Relativistic Harmonic Oscillator Revisited

TL;DR

This paper revisits the relativistic harmonic oscillator, revealing multiple Fock sectors with different properties, including ghost-free states, and explores their symmetry structures and implications for string theory.

Contribution

It uncovers three distinct Fock sectors with different vacua and symmetries, introduces a gauge approach to eliminate ghosts, and classifies the spectrum within Lorentz and global symmetry groups.

Findings

Identified three Fock sectors with different vacua and properties.

Developed a gauge symmetry approach to remove ghosts.

Classified the spectrum in Lorentz and SU(d,1) representations.

Abstract

The familiar Fock space commonly used to describe the relativistic harmonic oscillator, for example as part of string theory, is insufficient to describe all the states of the relativistic oscillator. We find that there are three different vacua leading to three disconnected Fock sectors, all constructed with the same creation-annihilation operators. These have different spacetime geometric properties as well as different algebraic symmetry properties or different quantum numbers. Two of these Fock spaces include negative norm ghosts (as in string theory) while the third one is completely free of ghosts. We discuss a gauge symmetry in a worldline theory approach that supplies appropriate constraints to remove all the ghosts from all Fock sectors of the single oscillator. The resulting ghost free quantum spectrum in d+1 dimensions is then classified in unitary representations of the Lorentz group SO(d,1). Moreover all states of the single oscillator put together make up a single infinite dimensional unitary representation of a hidden global symmetry SU(d,1), whose Casimir eigenvalues are computed. Possible applications of these new results in string theory and other areas of physics and mathematics are briefly mentioned.