The Generalised Principle of Perturbative Agreement and the Thermal Mass

The principle of perturbative agreement, as introduced by Hollands and Wald, is a renormalization condition in quantum field theory on curved spacetimes. This principle states that the perturbative and exact constructions of a field theoretic model given by the sum of a free and an exactly tractable interaction Lagrangian should agree. We develop a proof of the validity of this principle in the case of scalar fields and quadratic interactions without derivatives, which differs in strategy from the one given by Hollands and Wald for the case of quadratic interactions encoding a change of metric. Thereby, we profit from the observation that, in the case of quadratic interactions, the composition of the inverse classical Møller map and the quantum Møller map is a contraction exponential of a particular type. Afterwards, we prove a generalisation of the principle of perturbative agreement and show that considering an arbitrary quadratic contribution of a general interaction either as part of the free theory or as part of the perturbation gives equivalent results. Motivated by the thermal mass idea, we use our findings to extend the construction of massive interacting thermal equilibrium states in Minkowski spacetime developed by Fredenhagen and Lindner to the massless case. In passing, we also prove a property of the construction of Fredenhagen and Lindner which was conjectured by these authors.