Eliminating unphysical photon components from Dirac-Maxwell Hamiltonian quantized in the Lorenz gauge

Abstract

We study the Dirac-Maxwell model quantized in the Lorenz gauge. In this gauge, the space of quantum mechanical state vectors inevitably be an indefinite metric vector space so that the canonical commutation relation (CCR) is realized in a Lorentz covariant manner. In order to obtain a physical subspace in which no negative norm state exists, the method first proposed by Gupta and Bleuler is applied with mathematical rigor. It is proved that a suitably defined physical subspace has a positive semi-definit metric, and naturally induces a physical Hilbert space with a positive definite metric. The original Dirac-Maxwell Hamiltonian naturally defines an induced Hamiltonian on the physical Hilbert space which is essentially self-adjoint.