{"paper":{"title":"Off-shell equivalence in quantum field theory and gravity","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["gr-qc"],"primary_cat":"hep-th","authors_text":"Iber\\^e Kuntz, Stefano Liberati","submitted_at":"2026-07-14T11:23:30Z","abstract_excerpt":"Field redefinitions connect many formulations of the same physics, but the standard equivalence theorem is an on-shell result and cannot be used to decide when two quantum descriptions are equivalent off shell. This paper develops an operational criterion for that problem in terms of the Vilkovisky--DeWitt effective action. The central idea is that equivalence should be tested on scalar observables built by pairing configuration-space tensors with admissible probes. This makes the criterion sensitive to the observable class under consideration and separates the usual on-shell notion of equival"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2607.12644","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2607.12644/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}