The fermionic signature operator and Hadamard states in the presence of a plane electromagnetic wave (Q529866)

In quantum field theory the state of a physical system is described by a vector of the Fock space which in turn is built up from a ground state. In the time-dependent setting there is no longer an obvious choice for the ground state, because standard methods like frequency splitting can no longer be used. In this paper the authors considering a massive Dirac field in Minkowski space in the presence of an external electro-magnetic field of the form of a plane wave, i.e. whose electro-magnetic potential is a function of t+x. They show that even in this time-dependent situation there is a distinguished ground state which is of Hadamard form. A fermionic signature operator is constructed in the presence of an external potential that is neither static nor decays for large times. A harmonic plane wave with potential \[ A_2 = \lambda \cos(\Omega(t+x)), \quad A_3=0 \] is treated as an example.