Fully renormalized stress tensor correlator in flat space

Abstract

We present a general procedure to renormalize the stress tensor two-point correlation function on a Minkowski background in position space. The method is shown in detail for the case of a free massive scalar field in the standard Minkowski vacuum state, and explicit expressions are given for the counterterms and finite parts, which are in full accordance with earlier results for the massless case. For the general case in position space, only regularized --- but not renormalized --- results have been obtained previously. After a Fourier transformation to momentum space, we also check agreement with a previous calculation there. We generalize our results to general Hadamard states. Furthermore, the proposed procedure can presumably be generalized to the important case of an inflationary spacetime background, where the transition to momentum space is in general not possible.