A Numerical Experiment in DLCQ: Microcausality, Continuum Limit and all that

Abstract

Issues related with microcausality violation and continuum limit in the context of (1+1) dimensional scalar field theory in discretized light-cone quantization (DLCQ) are addressed in parallel with discretized equal time quantization (DETQ) and the fact that Lorentz invariance and microcausality are restored if one can take the continuum limit properly is emphasized. In the free case, it is shown with numerical evidence that the continuum results can be reproduced from DLCQ results for the Pauli-Jordan function and the real part of Feynman propagator. The contributions coming from $k^+$ near zero region in these cases are found to be very small in contrast to the common belief that $k^+=0$ is an accumulation point. In the interacting case, aspects related to the continuum limit of DLCQ results in perturbation theory are discussed.