Causal state updates in real scalar quantum field theory

Abstract

In relativistic Quantum Field Theory (QFT) ideal measurements of certain observables are physically impossible without violating causality. This prompts two questions: i) can a given observable be ideally measured in QFT, and ii) if not, in what sense can it be measured? Here we formulate a necessary and sufficient condition that any measurement, and more generally any state update (quantum operation), must satisfy to respect causality in real scalar QFT. We argue that for unitary `kicks' and operations involving 1-parameter families of Kraus operators, e.g. Gaussian measurements, the only causal observables are smeared fields and the identity -- the basic observables in real scalar QFT. We provide examples with more complicated operators such as products of smeared fields, and show that the associated state updates are acausal, and hence impossible. Despite this, one can still recover expectation values of such operators, and we show how to do this using only causal measurements of smeared fields.