Unitary evolution and uniqueness of the Fock representation of Dirac fields in cosmological spacetimes

TL;DR

This paper establishes a unique Fock quantization for a massive Dirac field in a closed cosmological spacetime by applying invariance and unitarity criteria, extending previous scalar field results to fermions.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the criteria used for scalar fields also ensure a unique Fock representation for Dirac fields in cosmological models.

Findings

The chosen complex structure is invariant under symmetries.

The Fock representation admits a unitary implementation of dynamics.

All representations satisfying the criteria are unitarily equivalent.

Abstract

We present a privileged Fock quantization of a massive Dirac field in a closed Friedmann-Robertson-Walker cosmology, partially selected by the criteria of invariance of the vacuum under the symmetries of the field equations, and unitary implementation of the dynamics. When quantizing free scalar fields in homogeneous and isotropic spacetimes with compact spatial sections, these criteria have been shown to pick out a unique Fock representation (up to unitary equivalence). Here, we employ the same criteria for fermion fields and explore whether that uniqueness result can be extended to the case of the Fock quantization of fermions. For the massive Dirac field, we start by introducing a specific choice of the complex structure that determines the Fock representation. Such structure is invariant under the symmetries of the equations of motion. We then prove that the corresponding representation of the canonical anticommutation relations admits a unitary implementation of the dynamics. Moreover, we construct a rather general class of representations that satisfy the above criteria, and we demonstrate that they are all unitarily equivalent to our previous choice. The complex structures in this class are restricted only by certain conditions on their asymptotic behavior for modes in the ultraviolet sector of the Dirac operator. We finally show that, if one assumes that these asymptotic conditions are in fact trivial once our criteria are fulfilled, then the time-dependent scaling in the definition of the fermionic annihilation and creation-like variables is essentially unique.