DIFFERENTIABILITY AND CONTINUITY OF QUANTUM-FIELDS ON A LATTICE

The differentiability and continuity properties of quantized bosonic fields on a lattice are examined. It is shown for free fields that, in the continuum limit, the dominant configurations in the functional integral become discontinuous when the spacetime dimension is greater than 1. It is argued that the same is true for interacting fields. This is unlike the one-dimensional case of quantum mechanics, in which the the dominant configurations are continuous but not differentiable. As a consequence of this discontinuity, classically equivalent actions may produce inequivalent quantum field theories upon functional-integral quantization.