On shell and off shell

In physics, particularly in quantum field theory, configurations of a physical system that satisfy classical equations of motion are called "on the mass shell" or simply more often on shell; while those that do not are called "off the mass shell", or off shell. In quantum field theory, virtual particles are termed off shell because they do not satisfy the energy–momentum relation; real exchange particles do satisfy this relation and are termed on shell (mass shell). In classical mechanics for instance, in the action formulation, extremal solutions to the variational principle are on shell and the Euler–Lagrange equations give the on-shell equations. Noether's theorem regarding differentiable symmetries of physical action and conservation laws is another on-shell theorem. Mass shell is a synonym for mass hyperboloid, meaning the hyperboloid in energy–momentum space describing the solutions to the equation: the mass–energy equivalence formula which gives the energy in terms of the momentum and the rest mass of a particle. The equation for the mass shell is also often written in terms of the four-momentum; in Einstein notation with metric signature (+,−,−,−) and units where the speed of light , as . In the literature, one may also encounter if the metric signature used is (−,+,+,+). The four-momentum of an exchanged virtual particle is , with mass . The four-momentum of the virtual particle is the difference between the four-momenta of the incoming and outgoing particles. Virtual particles corresponding to internal propagators in a Feynman diagram are in general allowed to be off shell, but the amplitude for the process will diminish depending on how far off shell they are. This is because the -dependence of the propagator is determined by the four-momenta of the incoming and outgoing particles. The propagator typically has singularities on the mass shell. When speaking of the propagator, negative values for that satisfy the equation are thought of as being on shell, though the classical theory does not allow negative values for the energy of a particle.