Fermionisation of the Aharonov--Bohm Phase on the Lightfront

TL;DR

This paper explores the quantisation of Wilson line operators on lightlike surfaces, revealing novel fermionic features and a non-unique ground state, contrasting with spacelike surface cases.

Contribution

It introduces a new framework for quantising holonomies on null surfaces, showing they become Grassmann variables and exhibit interpolating statistics.

Findings

Holonomies become Grassmann numbers upon quantisation.

Wilson line commutation relations interpolate between fermionic and bosonic.

Ground state depends on framing choice, with no unique vacuum.

Abstract

We consider the phase space of the Maxwell field as a simplified framework to study the quantisation of holonomies (Wilson line operators) on lightlike (null) surfaces. Our results are markedly different from the spacelike case. On a spacelike surface, electric and magnetic fluxes each form a commuting subalgebra. This implies that the holonomies commute. On a lightlike hypersurfaces, this is no longer true. Electric and magnetic fluxes are no longer independent. To compute the Poisson brackets explicitly, we choose a regularisation. Each path is smeared into a thin ribbon. In the resulting holonomy algebra, Wilson lines commute unless they intersect the same light ray. We compute the structure constants of the holonomy algebra and show that they depend on the geometry of the intersection and the conformal class of the metric at the null surface. Finally, we propose a quantisation. The resulting Hilbert space shows a number of unexpected features. First, the holonomies become anti-commuting Grassmann numbers. Second, for pairs of Wilson lines, the commutation relations can continuously interpolate between fermionic and bosonic relations. Third, there is no unique ground state. The ground state depends on a choice of framing of the underlying paths.