Hadamard states were originally introduced for quantised Klein--Gordon fields and occupy a central position in the theory of quantum fields on curved spacetimes. Subsequently they have been developed for other linear theories, such as the Dirac, Proca and Maxwell fields, but the particular features of each require slightly different treatments. This paper gives a generalised definition of Hadamard states for linear bosonic and fermionic theories encompassing a range of theories that are described by Green-hyperbolic operators with 'decomposable' Pauli--Jordan propagators, including theories whose bicharacteristic curves are not necessarily determined by the spacetime metric. The new definition reduces to previous definitions for normally hyperbolic and Dirac-type operators. We develop the theory of Hadamard states in detail, showing that our definition propagates under the equation of motion, and is also stable under pullbacks and suitable pushforwards. There is an equivalent formulation in terms of Hilbert space valued distributions, and the generalised Hadamard condition on 2-point functions constrains the singular behaviour of all n-point functions. For locally covariant theories, the Hadamard states form a covariant state space. It is also shown how Hadamard states may be combined through tensor products or reduced by partial tracing while preserving the Hadamard property. As a particular application it is shown that state updates resulting from nonselective measurements preserve the Hadamard condition. The treatment we give was partly inspired by a recent work of Moretti, Murro and Volpe (MMV) [Ann. H. Poincare 24, 3055-3111 (2023)] on the neutral Proca field. Among the other applications, we revisit the neutral Proca field and prove a complete equivalence between the MMV definition of Hadamard states and an older work of Fewster and Pfenning [J. Math. Phys. 44, 4480--4513 (2003)].
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)