On the Stress-Energy Tensor of Quantum Fields in Curved Spacetimes - Comparison of Different Regularization Schemes and Symmetry of the Hadamard/Seeley-DeWitt Coefficients

Abstract

We review a few rigorous and partly unpublished results on the regularisation of the stress-energy in quantum field theory on curved spacetimes: 1) the symmetry of the Hadamard/Seeley-DeWitt coefficients in smooth Riemannian and Lorentzian spacetimes 2) the equivalence of the local $\hat{I}\P$-function and the Hadamard-point-splitting procedure in smooth static spacetimes 3) the equivalence of the DeWitt-Schwinger- and the Hadamard-point-splitting procedure in smooth Riemannian and Lorentzian spacetimes.

24 pages, accepted for publication in Journal of Physics A, special issue devoted to S. Dowker's 75th birthday