paper

Second quantization and gauge invariance

arXiv:1306.0812

Abstract

It is well known that the single particle Dirac equation is gauge invariant. This means that observable quantities, such as the current density, are not affected by a gauge transformation. However what happens when the method of second quantization is applied to convert a single particle theory into a field theory? In this case it will be shown that the theory is no longer gauge invariant. This will be shown by considering the second quantization of a zero mass Dirac field in 1+1 dimensions and examining the change of the current density operator due to a gauge transformation.

Added some additional introductory material. Some other minor changes and correction of typos. 10 pages

References in corpus (2)