Antifermion sign of a normal-ordered bilinear
ID: antifermion-sign-of-a-normal-ordered-bilinear
In a Dirac field mode expansion, the antiparticle contribution to first appears with operator order . Normal ordering changes it to using the fermionic anticommutation relations. Thus its scattering coefficient is . Pair-annihilation and creation terms have the operator orders and . Keeping these orders and a fixed external-state convention determines interference signs, especially between exchange and annihilation graphs in a Yukawa interaction.
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