General first-order mass ladder operators for Klein-Gordon fields

We study the ladder operator on scalar fields, mapping a solution of the Klein-Gordon equation onto another solution with a different mass, when the operator is at most first order in derivatives. Imposing the commutation relation between the d'Alembertian, we obtain the general condition for the ladder operator, which contains a non-trivial case which was not discussed in the previous work [V. Cardoso, T. Houri and M. Kimura, Phys.Rev.D 96, 024044 (2017), arXiv:1706.07339]. We also discuss the relation with supersymmetric quantum mechanics.