(Pre-)Hilbert spaces in twistor quantization

TL;DR

This paper investigates suitable (pre-)Hilbert spaces for twistor quantization, clarifying the function spaces where twistor operators act as adjoints, and explores the properties of Penrose transforms in different cases.

Contribution

It identifies specific (pre-)Hilbert spaces where twistor operators are adjoint, clarifies the role of Penrose transforms, and distinguishes cases with and without singularities in massless fields.

Findings

Defined an inner product for helicity eigenfunctions.

Constructed Hilbert and pre-Hilbert spaces where the operators are valid.

Showed Penrose transform yields singularity-free fields only in the first case.

Abstract

In twistor theory, the canonical quantization procedure, called twistor quantization, is performed with the twistor operators represented as \hat{Z}^{A}=Z^{A}(\in C) and \hat{\bar{Z}}_{A}=-\frac{\partial}{\partial Z^{A}}. However, it has not been clarified what kind of function spaces this representation is valid in. In the present paper, we try to find appropriate (pre-)Hilbert spaces in which the above representation is realized as an adjoint pair of operators. To this end, we define an inner product for the helicity eigenfunctions by an integral over the product space of the circular space S^{1} and the upper half of projective twistor space. Using this inner product, we define a Hilbert space in some particular case and indefinite-metric pre-Hilbert spaces in other particular cases, showing that the above- mentioned representation is valid in these spaces. It is also shown that only the Penrose transform in the first particular case yields positive-frequency massless fields without singularities, while the Penrose transforms in the other particular cases yield positive-frequency massless fields with singularities.