English

Causality, unitarity, and indefinite metric in Maxwell-Chern-Simons extensions

High Energy Physics - Theory 2020-03-31 v2 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

We canonically quantize (2+1)(2+1)-dimensional electrodynamics including a higher-derivative Chern-Simons term. The effective theory describes a standard photon and an additional degree of freedom associated with a massive ghost. We find the Hamiltonian and the algebra satisfied by the field operators. The theory is characterized by an indefinite metric in the Hilbert space that brings up questions on causality and unitarity. We study both of the latter fundamental properties and show that microcausality as well as perturbative unitarity up to one-loop order are conserved when the Lee-Wick prescription is employed.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1911.12221,
  title  = {Causality, unitarity, and indefinite metric in Maxwell-Chern-Simons extensions},
  author = {Ricardo Avila and Jose R. Nascimento and Albert Yu. Petrov and Carlos M. Reyes and Marco Schreck},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.12221},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

New version published in PRD, Lee-Wick prescription in Sec. IV-C, 27 pages, 5 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:29:07.356Z