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Reeh-Schlieder Defeats Newton-Wigner: On Alternative Localization Schemes in Relativistic Quantum Field Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Hans Halvorson
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Abstract

Many of the “counterintuitive” features of relativistic quantum field theory have their formal root in the Reeh-Schlieder theorem, which in particular entails that local operations applied to the vacuum state can produce any state of the entire field. It is of great interest then that I. E. Segal and, more recently, G. Fleming (in a paper entitled “Reeh-Schlieder meets Newton-Wigner”) have proposed an alternative “Newton-Wigner” localization scheme that avoids the Reeh-Schlieder theorem. In this paper, I reconstruct the Newton-Wigner localization scheme and clarify the limited extent to which it avoids the counterintuitive consequences of the Reeh-Schlieder theorem. I also argue that there is no coherent interpretation of the Newton-Wigner localization scheme that renders it free from act-outcome correlations at spacelike separation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 68 , Issue 1 , March 2001 , pp. 111 - 133
Copyright
Copyright © 2001 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I would like to thank Jeremy Butterfield, Gordon Fleming, Bernard Kay, David Malament, and especially Rob Clifton for helpful discussions.

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