Where infinite spin particles are localizable (Q2630743): Difference between revisions

The existence of massless, infinite spin, irreducible, unitary representations of (the universal cover of) the Poincaré group has been a long-standing puzzle for relativistic quantum field theorists. How to interpret these representations as physical particles? Why we cannot detect particles of this kind in Nature? On the one hand it has been known for a long time that quantum fields carrying massless infinite spin unitary representations cannot have pointlike localization in space-time hence cannot appear in a relativistic quantum field theory satisfying the Wightman axioms, for example. On the other hand it is also known that quantum fields with stringlike localization can carry massless infinite spin unitary representations. In this article the authors prove within an algebraic quantum field theory framework that in any space-time of dimension greater than two, a relativistic quantum field carrying a massless infinite spin unitary representation cannot have a localization in a double-cone of space-time (for a precise formulation cf. Theorems 6.1, 8.5 as well as 9.3). The proof uses the Tomita-Takesaki modular theory of operator algebras and mainly rests on a technical assumption called the \textit{Bisognano-Wichmann property}. It proposes a relation between the actions of the modular group and the Poincaré group on those subspaces of the Hilbert space (carrying any positive energy unitary representation of the universal cover of the Poincaré group) which correspond to Poincaré-covariant wedge regions in space-time (for a precise definition cf. the bottom of p. 589 in the article). The authors also give counter-examples to their result if the Bisognano-Wichmann property fails (cf. Section 7).