The Tachyon Field below the mass barrier

TL;DR

This paper investigates the quantum properties of a tachyon field with sub-mass barrier momenta, revealing a unique propagator structure and confirming its relation to the Wheeler Green function.

Contribution

It provides a quantization of the tachyon field with momenta below the mass barrier and demonstrates the propagator as a half-advanced, half-retarded Wheeler Green function.

Findings

The field's plane wave solutions exhibit real exponential time evolution.

The vacuum expectation values of field operator products are evaluated.

The propagator is shown to be the Wheeler Green function.

Abstract

We consider a tachyon field whose Fourier components correspond to spatial momenta with modulus smaller than the mass parameter. The plane wave solutions have them a time evolution which is a real exponential. The field is quantized and the solution of the eigenvalue problem for the Hamiltonian leads to the evaluation of the vacuum expectation value of products of field operators. The propagator turns out to be half-advanced and half-retarded. This completes the proof [4] that the total propagator is the Wheeler Green function [4,7].