Adiabatic Ground States in Non-smooth Spacetimes

Abstract

Ground states are a well-known class of Hadamard states in smooth spacetimes. In this paper, we show that the ground state of the Klein–Gordon field in a non-smooth ultrastatic spacetime is an adiabatic state. The order of the state depends linearly on the regularity of the metric. We obtain the result by combining a propagation of singularities result for non-smooth pseudodifferential operators, properties of the causal propagator, and eigenvalue asymptotics for elliptic operators of low regularity.