On some meaningful inner product for real Klein—Gordon fields with positive semi-definite norm

Abstract

A simple derivation of a meaningful, manifestly covariant inner product for real Klein—Gordon (KG) fields with positive semi-definite norm is provided, which turns out — assuming a symmetric bilinear form — to be the real-KG-field limit of the inner product for complex KG fields reviewed by A. Mostafazadeh and F. Zamani in December 2003, and February 2006 (quant-ph/0312078, quant-ph/0602151, quant-ph/0602161). It is explicitly shown that the positive semi-definite norm associated with the derived inner product for real KG fields measures the number of active positive and negative energy Fourier-modes of the real KG field on the relativistic mass shell. The very existence of an inner product with positive semi-definite norm for the considered real, i.e. neutral, KG fields shows that the metric operator entering the inner product does not contain the charge-conjugation operator. This observation sheds some additional light on the meaning of the C operator in the CPT inner product of PT-symmetric quantum mechanics defined by C.M. Bender, D.C. Brody and H.F. Jones.