Quantum inequalities for the free Rarita-Schwinger fields in flat spacetime

Abstract

Using the methods developed by Fewster and colleagues, we derive a quantum inequality for the free massive spin-$\frac{3}{2}$ Rarita-Schwinger fields in the four dimensional Minkowski spacetime. Our quantum inequality bound for the Rarita-Schwinger fields is weaker, by a factor of 2, than that for the spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ Dirac fields. This fact along with other quantum inequalities obtained by various other authors for the fields of integer spin (bosonic fields) using similar methods lead us to conjecture that, in the flat spacetime, separately for bosonic and fermionic fields, the quantum inequality bound gets weaker as the the number of degrees of freedom of the field increases. A plausible physical reason might be that the more the number of field degrees of freedom, the more freedom one has to create negative energy, therefore, the weaker the quantum inequality bound.

arXiv commentRevtex, 11 pages, to appear in PRD

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• Quantum Energy Inequality for the Massive Ising Model
• An explicit quantum weak energy inequality for Dirac fields in curved spacetimes
• Quantum Inequalities from Operator Product Expansions
• A quantum weak energy inequality for the Dirac field in two-dimensional flat spacetime
• Covariant Quantization of "Massive" Spin-3/2 Fields in the de Sitter Space
• Quantum inequalities for massless spin-3/2 field in Minkowski spacetime
• Note on the energy-momentum tensor for general mixed tensor-spinor fields
• Localized thermal states and negative energy