Are inertial vacua equivalent in Lorentz-violating theories? Does it matter?
Abstract
Several approaches to quantum gravity suggest violations of Lorentz symmetry as low-energy signatures. This article uses a concrete Lorentz-violating quantum field theory to study different inertial vacua. We show that they are unitarily inequivalent and that the vacuum in one inertial frame appears, in a different inertial frame, to be populated with particles of arbitrarily high momenta. At first sight, this poses a critical challenge to the physical validity of Lorentz-violating theories, since we do not witness vacuum excitations by changing inertial frames. Nevertheless, we demonstrate that inertial Unruh-De Witt detectors are insensitive to these effects. We also discuss the Hadamard condition for this Lorentz-violating theory.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2301.06600,
title = {Are inertial vacua equivalent in Lorentz-violating theories? Does it matter?},
author = {Bruno Arderucio Costa and Yuri Bonder and Benito A. Juárez-Aubry},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.06600},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
Revised and extended version. 12 pages, 1 figure