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Certain exotic phenomena in general relativity, such as backward time travel, appear to require the presence of matter with negative energy. While quantum fields are a possible source of negative energy densities, there are lower bounds -…
It has been shown that if one solves self-consistently the semiclassical Einstein equations in the presence of a quantum scalar field, with a cutoff on the number of modes, spacetime become flatter when the cutoff increases. Here we extend…
De Sitter spacetime can be separated into two parts along two kinds of hypersurfaces and the half-de Sitter spacetimes are covered by the planar and hyperbolic coordinates respectively. Two positive energy theorems were proved previously…
The construction and analysis of deformations of quantum field theories by warped convolutions is extended to a class of globally hyperbolic spacetimes. First, we show that any four-dimensional spacetime which admits two commuting and…
Although the standard viewpoint in theoretical physics is that the unification of quantum theory and general relativity requires the quantization of gravity and spacetime, there is not consensus about whether spacetime must fundamentally…
We study scalar (not necessarily conformal) quantum fields on self-similar spacetimes. It is shown that in states respecting the self-similarity the expectation value of the stress tensor gives rise to a Lyapunov exponent $\omega_q = 2$,…
In this paper, we study the Casimir effect in a curved spacetime described by gravitational actions quadratic in the curvature. In particular, we consider the dynamics of a massless scalar field confined between two nearby plates and…
The physical world is quantum. However, our description of the quantum physics still relies much on concepts in classical physics and in some cases with `quantized' interpretations. The most important case example is that of spacetime. We…
Before we ask what the quantum gravity theory is, it is a legitimate quest to formulate a robust quantum field theory in curved spacetime (QFTCS). Several conceptual problems, especially unitarity loss (pure states evolving into mixed…
In this paper we discuss local averages of the energy density for the non-minimally coupled scalar quantum field, extending a previous investigation of the classical field. By an explicit example, we show that such averages are unbounded…
Fewster and Mistry have given an explicit, non-optimal quantum weak energy inequality that constrains the smeared energy density of Dirac fields in Minkowski spacetime. Here, their argument is adapted to the case of flat, two-dimensional…
In a previous paper, a bound on the negative energy density seen by an arbitrary inertial observer was derived for the free massless, quantized scalar field in four-dimensional Minkowski spacetime. This constraint has the form of an…
We consider a free particle in a de Sitter spacetime. We use a picture in which the analogs of the Schr\"odinger operators of the particle are independent of both the time and the space coordinates. These operators induce operators which…
In this paper, we propose a novel Quantum Spacetime Theory (QST) that reinterprets spacetime as an emergent structure, challenging the traditional block universe paradigm and aligning with research into emergent spacetime. Using a sphere…
We apply the new quantization scheme outlined in Phys. Rev. D102 (2020) 125001 to explore the influence which quantum vacuum fluctuations of the spacetime metric exert on the universes of Quantum Einstein Gravity, which is regarded an…
Recently, Larry Ford and Tom Roman have discovered that in a flat cylindrical space, although the stress-energy tensor itself fails to satisfy the averaged null energy condition (ANEC) along the (non-achronal) null geodesics, when the…
Small violations of spacetime symmetries have recently been identified as promising Planck-scale signals. This talk reviews how such violations can arise in various approaches to quantum gravity, how the emergent low-energy effects can be…
Gravity curves spacetime. In regions where the de Broglie wavelength is very small compared to the curvature of spacetime, the wave equations in flat spacetime can be generalized to curved spacetime. The validity of the formulation when the…
In classical physics the energy density of a field is always positive. However this does not hold true for quantum physics where the energy density of a field can be locally negative. There are limits on the weighted average of this…
The aim of these notes is to elucidate some aspects of quantum field theory in curved spacetime, especially those relating to the notion of particles. A selection of issues relevant to wave-particle duality is given. The case of a generic…