Unitary implementability of Darboux transformations

Abstract

We investigate the unitary implementability of the canonical transformations corresponding to Darboux transformations in the Hamiltonian formalism recently developed for gauge invariant perturbations of nonrotating black holes. Starting from the formalism in the black hole interior, we demonstrate that these canonical transformations are unitarily implementable under general conditions on the effective potentials appearing in the master equations of the perturbations. We also show that the privileged massless Fock representation of the perturbative variables selected by admitting (Heisenberg) unitary dynamics, employed in our quantization, is not unitarily equivalent to the simple massless representation of the master variables satisfying the effective Regge-Wheeler equation. This highlights the importance of the choice of master variables in which the quantum representation is initially defined. Furthermore, we show that not all such choices of variables possessing unitarily implementable dynamics can be reached through Darboux transformations, but rather through more general canonical transformations. These results advance our understanding of the relationship between well-established classical relations in black hole perturbation theory and their quantum representations, explaining how isospectral Darboux transformations can be extended to include all the infinitely many possible values of the angular momentum such that they are unitarily implementable in a quantum field theory context.