Criteria for the determination of time dependent scalings in the Fock quantization of scalar fields with a time dependent mass in ultrastatic spacetimes

TL;DR

This paper establishes criteria to uniquely determine the Fock quantization of scalar fields with time-dependent mass in ultrastatic spacetimes, extending previous results to include all possible time-dependent scalings of the field.

Contribution

It extends the uniqueness of Fock quantization to all field descriptions reachable by time-dependent canonical transformations, including scalings, in less than four spatial dimensions.

Findings

Criteria eliminate nontrivial scalings of the field.

Time redefinitions of the momentum are either disallowed or do not produce new inequivalent representations.

Uniqueness holds for compact spatial manifolds in less than four dimensions.

Abstract

For Klein-Gordon fields, it is well known that there exist an infinite number of nonequivalent Fock representations of the canonical commutation relations and, therefore, of inequivalent quantum theories. A context in which this kind of ambiguities arises and prevents the derivation of robust results is, e.g., in the quantum analysis of cosmological perturbations. In these situations, typically, a suitable scaling of the field by a time dependent function leads to a description in an auxiliary static background, though the nonstationarity still shows up in a time dependent mass. For such a field description, and assuming the compactness of the spatial sections, we recently proved in three or less spatial dimensions that the criteria of a natural implementation of the spatial symmetries and of a unitary time evolution are able to select a unique class of unitarily equivalent vacua, and hence of Fock representations. In this work, we succeed to extend our uniqueness result to the consideration of all possible field descriptions that can be reached by a time dependent canonical transformation which, in particular, involves a scaling of the field by a function of time. This kind of canonical transformations modify the dynamics of the system and introduce a further ambiguity in its quantum description, exceeding the choice of a Fock representation. Remarkably, for any compact spatial manifold in less than four dimensions, we show that our criteria eliminate any possible nontrivial scaling of the field other than that leading to the description in an auxiliary static background. Besides, we show that either no time dependent redefinition of the field momentum is allowed or, if this may happen, the redefinition does not introduce any Fock representation that cannot be obtained by a unitary transformation.