scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1341582
Refined algebraic quantization (henceforth denoted by RAQ) is a procedure to quantize systems with constraints which has been mainly applied to the quantization of gravity. The paper under review illustrates in an heuristic way some of the rules of the RAQ method in a class of simplified examples having constraints quadratic in momenta. In particular, the constraint considered by the author in the first section is \(\widehat{\mathcal C}\psi=(-\nabla^\alpha\nabla_\alpha+U)\psi=0\), which is interpreted as the Wheeler-DeWitt equation in the context of minisuperspace or more traditionally as the Klein-Gordon equation with potential \(U\) on a spacetime manifold \(\mathcal M\). Then, some of the difficulties of quantizing a scalar field on a curved spacetime due to the ambiguity of choosing a positive frequency part of the solutions of the corresponding wave-equation are mentioned. For a more precise description of the relation between the real symplectic phase space and its possible one-particle Hilbert space structures we recommend subsection~3.2 in \textit{B. S. Kay} and \textit{R. M. Wald} [Phys. Rep. 207, 49-136 (1991; Zbl 0861.53074)] or \textit{R. M. Wald} [Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetime and Black Hole Thermodynamics. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago (1994; Zbl 0842.53052)]. In this context it would be interesting to know if the RAQ procedure serves to select a particular family of physical states within the set of Hadamard states. In Section~2 two heuristic ways for selecting the subspace of physical vectors and the corresponding scalar product between them are described. The first one uses formal manipulations of the object \(\delta(\widehat{\mathcal C})\), where \(\widehat{\mathcal C}\) is the constraint operator defined in the kinematic Hilbert space \(\mathcal H\). The second one views the constraint equation above as a generalized eigenvalue problem and introduces a suitable set of generalized eigenvectors. Finally, in the last section the author pretends to partly justify the formal manipulations of the previous one. Starting with a suitable subspace \(\Phi\) of the domain of the constraint operator \(\widehat{\mathcal C}\) one can consider the Gelfand triple \(\Phi\subset{\mathcal H}\subset\Phi'\). Now one of the fundamental objects of the RAQ procedure is the so--called rigging map \(\eta\colon\;\Phi\to\Phi'\), which actually allows to indentify the physical subspace as a subspace in \(\Phi'\) which solves the constraint equation in the distributional sense. The paper under review is written in a rather informal style and gives an incomplete view of the RAQ procedure (e.g. nothing is said about the observables in this context). The reader is told to consult the references to learn something of the functional analytical or measure theoretical questions involved in this method. Other approaches that deal with the quantization of systems with constraints that are not included in the references are e.g. the \(C^*\)-algebra method by \textit{H. Grundling} and \textit{C. A. Hurst} [Commun. Math. Phys. 98, 369-390 (1989; Zbl 0578.46064)] or the coherent state quantization by \textit{J.~Klauder} [Ann. Phys. 254, 419-453 (1997)]. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0897.00038].
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