Estudo de aspectos clássicos e quânticos do campo de Dirac em espaço-tempo curvo

Abstract

This thesis is composed by two main parts. On the first one, the Dirac fermion was considered interacting with different external fields. A very efficient approach to extract physical information from the Hamiltonian is to perform a Foldy-Wouthuysen transformation on it. There are, on the literature, two versions of this transformation. The standard and the exact ones. The main difference between them is that the last is not based on a power series low in the parameter l/m. On this thesis, we developed a method to perform the exact Foldy-Wouthuysen with the fields of interest. The Dirac field was described in a constant magnetic field plus gravitational wave background. The transformed Hamiltonian shows that the effect of the gravitational wave on the magnetic field could be, in principle, enforced by a sufficient strong magnetic field. Similar calculations was performed to the temporal component of the gravitational torsion field. Furthermore, it was done a general classification of the possible terms the violate the CPT and Lorentz symmetries, selecting those of them wich allow the exact transformation. A new approach to qualitatively study the cases for wich this kind of transformation is not allowed, was developed. This technique was called semi-exact transformation and has the advantage to the standard transformation of being much more economic in the calculations part. As examples of application it was considered the cases of external electric field and the vectorial component of the torsion gravitational field. On the second part of the thesis, it was calculated the one loop quantum corrections to the photon sector of the quantum electrodynamics in a gravitational background. The calculation was done using the "heat-kernel" technique in two different ways and an ambiguity on the results was found. This fact represents the first known example of the so called multiplicative anomaly. The calculations were performed to different space-time dimensions and a qualitative explanation of this anomaly was found. The non local formfactors to the electromagnetic field was obtained and also the one loop complete beta function, that describes the energy variation of it in relation to the energy of the process and it is valid to all energy scales. Using this beta function, the more complete form of the famous Appelquist e Carazzone theorem was obtained.