On the local structure of the Klein-Gordon field on curved spacetimes

Abstract

This paper investigates wave-equations on spacetimes with a metric which is locally analytic in the time. We use recent results in the theory of the non-characteristic Cauchy problem to show that a solution to a wave-equation vanishing in an open set vanishes in the ``envelope'' of this set, which may be considerably larger and in the case of timelike tubes may even coincide with the spacetime itself. We apply this result to the real scalar field on a globally hyperbolic spacetime and show that the field algebra of an open set and its envelope coincide. As an example there holds an analog of Borchers' timelike tube theorem for such scalar fields and hence, algebras associated with world lines can be explicitly given. Our result applies to cosmologically relevant spacetimes.