Canonical quantization of the dark positive-energy Dirac field and time asymmetry

Abstract

We perform canonical quantization of the single-component, spin-zero field that was introduced by Dirac in 1971 and recently suggested as a candidate for dark matter by Bogomolny. The massive and massless cases are treated separately. Since in the massive case only positive-frequency modes are normalizable and regarded as physical, the mode expansion for the field involves annihilation operators only, making the quantization procedure particularly simple. The corresponding Hamiltonian turns out to be unambiguous, with no need for normal ordering. The positive-energy requirement imposed on the second-quantized system leads to equally acceptable Bose and Fermi choices for particle statistics. This suggests a simple extension of original Dirac's theory in which Bose and Fermi single-component positive-energy Dirac fields are combined into a doublet whose members can transform into each other. The model includes a Landau-Anderson-Higgs type potential that allows spontaneous selection of the direction in the internal bose-fermi space. The bosonic sector of the theory hints at the possibility of a dark, background spacetime condensate that could endow the universe with its cosmological temporal asymmetry. In the massless case of Dirac's original theory, we explore the possibility of allowing the field expansion to involve both positive- and negative-frequency modes. This leads to the anticommutation relations for creation and annihilation operators associated with the negative energy solutions, resulting in supersymmetric behavior of the single-component field in the ultrarelativistic limit. Finally, we speculate on the possibility for the positive-energy Dirac particles to obey some exotic (such as non-abelian, Clifford) statistics in which the particles are neither created nor destroyed.