corner
corner

Phys. Rev. D 45, 1198–1209 (1992)

Path integral for the relativistic particle in curved space

Download: PDF (546 kB) Buy this article Export: BibTeX or EndNote (RIS)

Rafael Ferraro
Instituto de Astronomía y Física del Espacio, Casilla de Correo 67, Sucursal 28, 1428 Buenos Aires, Argentina
Departamento de Física, Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Ciudad Universitaria, Pab. I, 1428 Buenos Aires, Argentina

Received 29 July 1991; published in the issue dated 15 February 1992

The propagator for a single relativistic particle in a (D+1)-dimensional curved background is obtained by evaluating the canonical path integral in the true 2D-dimensional phase space. Since only paths moving forward in time are integrated, the resulting propagator depends on how the time is chosen; i.e., it depends on the reference system. In order for the propagator to satisfy the properties of a unitary theory, the time must be attached to a Killing vector. Although the measure is unique (it is the Liouville measure), the skeletonization of the phase-space functional action is ambiguous. One such ambiguity is exploited to obtain different propagators obeying the Klein-Gordon equation with different couplings to quantities related to the shape of the reference system (spatial curvature, etc.).

© 1992 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevD.45.1198
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevD.45.1198
PACS:
03.65.Db, 04.60.+n