The Infrared Behaviour in Nelson's Model of a Quantum Particle Coupled to a Massless Scalar Field

Abstract

We prove that Nelson's massless scalar field model is infrared divergent in three dimensions. In particular, the Nelson Hamiltonian has no ground state in Fock space and thus it is not unitarily equivalent with the Hamiltonian obtained from Euclidean quantization. In contrast, for dimensions higher than three the Nelson Hamiltonian has a unique ground state in Fock space and the two Hamiltonians are unitarily equivalent. We also show that the Euclidean Hamiltonian has no spectral gap.