English

Light-front quantization is the same as instant-time quantization

High Energy Physics - Theory 2020-01-15 v1 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

Commutation or anticommutation relations quantized at equal instant time and commutation or anticommutation relations quantized at equal light-front time cannot be transformed into each other. While they would thus appear to describe different theories, we show that this is not in fact the case. In instant-time quantization unequal instant-time commutation or anticommutation relations for free scalar, fermion, or gauge boson fields are c-numbers. We show that when these unequal instant-time commutation or anticommutation relations are evaluated at equal light-front time they are identical to the equal light-front time commutation or anticommutation relations. Light-front quantization and instant-time quantization are thus the same and thus describe the same physics.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2001.04603,
  title  = {Light-front quantization is the same as instant-time quantization},
  author = {Philip D. Mannheim},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.04603},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

7 pages. Prepared for proceedings of "Light Cone 2019 - QCD on the light cone: from hadrons to heavy ions". This is the conference version of arXiv:1909.03548 [hep-ph], with which it thus has substantial overlap

R2 v1 2026-06-23T13:10:25.341Z