Infrared behavior and gauge artifacts in de Sitter spacetime: The photon field

Abstract

We study the infrared (long distance) behavior of the free photon field in de Sitter spacetime. Using a two-parameter family of gauge fixing terms, we show that the infrared (IR) behavior of the two-point function is highly gauge-dependent and ranges from vanishing to growing. This situation is in disagreement with its counterpart in flat spacetime, where the two-point function vanishes in the IR for any choice of the gauge fixing parameters. A criterion to isolate the "physical" part of the two-point function is given and is shown to lead to a well-behaved two-point function in the IR.

4 pages, published version

References in corpus (2)

• The IR stability of de Sitter: Loop corrections to scalar propagators
• Cosmological Dark Energy: Prospects for a Dynamical Theory

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• Electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations around a cosmic string in de Sitter spacetime
• Photon propagator for inflation in the general covariant gauge
• Regularized stress tensor of vector fields in de Sitter space
• Photon quantization in cosmological spaces
• Electromagnetic vacuum stresses and energy fluxes induced by a cosmic string in de Sitter spacetime