Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-quantum-field-theory-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2018/1/b/solution

The canonical momenta are , so
Different species commute at equal times, so these products have no ordering ambiguity and is Hermitian. Write . Substituting the mode expansion of a free field and using the spatial Fourier transform identity gives
Subtract the expression with species interchanged. The two-annihilator terms cancel after , as do the two-creator terms. Commuting different species in the remaining terms yields
There is no infinite vacuum contribution to the Noether charge to subtract: the contractions that would generate a species-diagonal constant are absent.
The bosonic canonical commutation relations give
Define the creation operators
Their commutators with are . Since , the one-particle states have
The fixed-momentum states are delta-function normalized; a square-integrable wave packet of either species is a normalizable state with the same Noether charge eigenvalue. In this basis , so it measures a difference of occupation numbers. The equal-time identity , independently checks the sign against a.

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