Saturday, May 4, 2019

quantum field theory - Does the Lorentz invariance of equation of motion guarantee the Lorentz invariance of the solutions?


If I have a Lorentz invariant equation of motion, like Klein-Gordon equation, is the solution automatically guaranteed to be Lorentz invariant?


I ask this question because of the discussion from Mark Srednicki's Quantum Field Theory section 3 from equations (3.11) to (3.14). If I have a K-G equation, μμϕm2ϕ=0,

we have a solution of the form exp(ikx±iωt),
which I do not think is Lorentz invariant for solution with ikx+iωt as an argument, unless we allow kμ=(ω,k).


However, he starts constructing a Lorentz invariant solution, and comes up with ϕ(x,t)=d˜k[a(k)eikx+a(k)eikx],

where kx=kxωt. d˜k is a Lorentz invariant measure and argument of each exponents are Lorentz invariant as well.



However, he says in the beginning that a(k) is an arbitrary function of the wave vector k, which does not sound Lorentz invariant to me. So I am not sure how ϕ(x,t) is Lorentz invariant.



Answer



In the spirit of the original post, let k,x be 4-vectors and k, x the spatial components. Then a quantity of the form ϕ(x)dk[a(k)eikx+a(k)eikx]

is manifestly Lorentz invariant because it does not explicit contain any free Lorentz indices. What Srednicki does is that he performs the k0 integration, resulting in ϕ(x,t)=dkf(k)[a(k)eikx+a(k)eikx],
which only includes spatial components. This expression is Lorentz invariant because it is just a different form of the previous one, but it does not manifestly look Lorentz invariant which I assume what causes the confusion. For an explicit form of the function f which will of course be related to the energy as it is the integral over k0, see for example Peskin and Schroeder eqn (2.47).




EDIT: Some more justification:


The Klein-Gordon eqn is μμϕm2ϕ=0.

To solve it, we Fourier transform to momentum space and we get: (pμpμm2)˜ϕ=0.
The general solution of this eqn is ˜ϕ(p)=a(p)δ(pμpμm2),
which means that the general solution for the Klein-Gordon is: ϕ(x)=1(2π)4d4peipx˜ϕ(p)=1(2π)4d4peipxa(p)δ(pμpμm2)
which is manifestly Lorentz invariant. You can then perform the p0 integration as claimed above. I have ignored the complex conjugate term everywhere but should be trivial to restore...


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