Published January 7, 2011 | Version v1
Journal article

Energy Flux Positivity and Unitarity in Conformal Field Theories

  • 1. Department of Physics, University of Amsterdam, Valckenierstraat 65, 1018XE Amsterdam (Netherlands)
  • 2. C. N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York 11794-3840 (United States)

Description

We show that in most conformal field theories the condition of the energy flux positivity, proposed by Hofman and Maldacena, is equivalent to the absence of ghosts. At finite temperature and large energy and momenta, the two-point functions of the stress energy tensor develop light like poles. The residues of the poles can be computed, as long as the only spin-two conserved current, which appears in the stress energy tensor operator-product expansion and acquires a nonvanishing expectation value at finite temperature, is the stress energy tensor. The condition for the residues to stay positive and the theory to remain ghost-free is equivalent to the condition of positivity of energy flux.

Additional details

Publishing Information

Journal Title
Physical Review Letters
Journal Volume
106
Journal Issue
1
Journal Page Range
p. 011601-011601.4
ISSN
0031-9007
CODEN
PRLTAO

Optional Information

Notes
(c) 2011 American Institute of Physics