Dynamical locality of the free Maxwell field

Abstract

We consider the non-interacting source-free Maxwell field, described both in terms of the vector potential and the field strength. Starting from the classical field theory on contractible globally hyperbolic spacetimes, we extend the classical field theory to general globally hyperbolic spacetimes in two ways to obtain a "universal" theory and a "reduced" theory. The quantum field theory in terms of the unital $\ast$-algebra of the smeared quantum field is then obtained by an application of a suitable quantisation functor. We show that the universal theories fail local covariance and dynamical locality owing to the possibility of having non-trivial radicals in the classical and non-trivial centres in the quantum case. The reduced theories are both locally covariant and dynamically local. These models provide new examples relevant to the discussion of how theories should be formulated so as to describe the same physics in all spacetimes.

27pp v3: Some comments added; minor corrections and typos fixed

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• Snowmass White Paper: The Quest to Define QFT
• The Semiclassical Einstein Equation on Cosmological Spacetimes
• Hadamard states for quantum Abelian duality
• Relative Cauchy evolution for linear homotopy AQFTs
• Locally covariant quantum field theory and the spin-statistics connection
• Algebra of Observables and States for Quantum Abelian Duality