Boundary conditions and infrared divergences

Abstract

We review the procedure to construct quasi-free ground states, for real scalar fields whose dynamics is dictated by the Klein-Gordon equation, on standard static Lorentzian manifolds with a time-like boundary. We observe that, depending on the assigned boundary condition of Robin type, this procedure does not always lead to the existence of a suitable bi-distribution ω2∈D′(M×M) due to the presence of infrared divergences. As a concrete example we consider a Bertotti-Robinson spacetime in two different coordinate patches. In one case we show that infrared divergences do not occur only for Dirichlet boundary conditions as one might expect a priori, while, in the other case, we prove that they occur only when Neumann boundary conditions are imposed at the time-like boundary.

Keywords

• Quantum field theory on curved spacetimes
• Infrared divergences
• Bertotti-Robinson spacetime