Related papers: The Smeared Null Energy Condition
Quantum fields can notoriously violate the null energy condition (NEC). In a cosmological context, NEC violation can lead to, e.g., dark energy at late times with an equation-of-state parameter smaller than $-1$ and nonsingular bounces at…
The averaged null energy condition has known violations for quantum fields in curved space, even if one considers only achronal geodesics. Many such examples involve rapid variation in the stress-energy tensor in the vicinity of the…
The classic singularity theorems of General Relativity rely on energy conditions that can be violated in semiclassical gravity. Here, we provide motivation for an energy condition obeyed by semiclassical gravity: the smeared null energy…
This paper initiates a program which seeks to study the allowed spatial distributions of negative energy density in quantum field theory. Here we deal with free fields in Minkowski spacetime. Known restrictions on time integrals of the…
Recently a bound on negative energy densities in four-dimensional Minkowski spacetime was derived for a minimally coupled, quantized, massless, scalar field in an arbitrary quantum state. The bound has the form of an uncertainty…
The classical singularity theorems of General Relativity rely on energy conditions that are easily violated by quantum fields. Here, we provide motivation for an energy condition obeyed in semiclassical gravity: the smeared null energy…
The imposition of boundary conditions upon a quantized field can lead to singular energy densities on the boundary. We treat the boundaries as quantum mechanical objects with a nonzero position uncertainty, and show that the singular energy…
The Averaged Null Energy Condition (ANEC) states that the integral along a complete null geodesic of the projection of the stress-energy tensor onto the tangent vector to the geodesic cannot be negative. Exotic spacetimes, such as those…
In quantum field theory it is generally known that the energy density may be negative at a given point in spacetime. A number of papers have shown that there is a restriction on this energy density which is called a quantum inequality (QI).…
The Averaged Null Energy Condition (ANEC) requires that the average along a complete null geodesic of the projection of the stress-energy tensor onto the geodesic tangent vector can never be negative. It is sufficient to rule out many…
The null energy condition (NEC), an important assumption of the Penrose singularity theorem, is violated by quantum fields. The natural generalization of the NEC in quantum field theory, the renormalized null energy averaged over a finite…
Negative energy density is unavoidable in the quantum theory of field. We give a revised proof of the existence of negative energy density unambiguously for a massless scalar field.
The Averaged Null Energy Condition (ANEC) states that the integral along a complete null geodesic of the projection of the stress-energy tensor onto the tangent vector to the geodesic cannot be negative. ANEC can be used to rule out…
In classical physics the energy density of a field, such as the electromagnetic field, is always positive. However, in quantum field theory it has been shown that the energy density can be negative. There are restrictions, called the…
A null line is a complete achronal null geodesic. It is proven that for any quantum fields minimally coupled to semiclassical Einstein gravity, the averaged null energy condition (ANEC) on null lines is a consequence of the generalized…
In the weak field expansion of euclidean quantum gravity, an analysis of the Wilson loops in terms of the gauge group, $SO(4)$, shows that the correspondent statistical system does not develope any configuration with localized curvature at…
The Sommerfeld boundary conditions, applied to an asymptotically weak gravitational field, are shown to imply that the 1/r part of the curvature tensor of a space-time, satisfying the Einstein equations, is of type null in the Petrov…
In this paper we investigate the energy distribution of states of a linear scalar quantum field with arbitrary curvature coupling on a curved spacetime which fulfill some local thermality condition. We find that this condition implies a…
For the quantised, massless, minimally coupled real scalar field in four-dimensional Minkowski space, we show (by an explicit construction) that weighted averages of the null-contracted stress-energy tensor along null geodesics are…
It is shown that the averaged null energy condition is fulfilled for a dense, translationally invariant set of vector states in any local quantum field theory in two-dimensional Minkowski spacetime whenever the theory has a mass gap and…