Room P3.10, Mathematics Building

Masashi Kimura, Instituto Superior Técnico
Mass Ladder Operators

We introduce a novel type of ladder operators, which map a solution to the massive Klein-Gordon equation into another solution with a different mass. It is shown that such operators are constructed from closed conformal Killing vector fields in arbitrary dimensions if the vector fields are eigenvectors of the Ricci tensor. As an example, we explicitly construct the ladder operators in AdS spacetime. It is shown that the ladder operators exist for masses above the Breitenlohner-Freedman bound. We also discuss their applications, ladder operator for spherical harmonics, the relation between supersymmetric quantum mechanics, and some phenomenon around extremal black holes whose near horizon geometry is AdS2.