No Arabic abstract
The essence of the path integral method in quantum physics can be expressed in terms of two relations between unitary propagators, describing perturbations of the underlying system. They inherit the causal structure of the theory and its invariance properties under variations of the action. These relations determine a dynamical algebra of bounded operators which encodes all properties of the corresponding quantum theory. This novel approach is applied to non-relativistic particles, where quantum mechanics emerges from it. The method works also in interacting quantum field theories and sheds new light on the foundations of quantum physics.
We identify the Taylor coefficients of the transfer matrices corresponding to quantum toroidal algebras with the elliptic local and non-local integrals of motion introduced by Kojima, Shiraishi, Watanabe, and one of the authors. That allows us to prove the Litvinov conjectures on the Intermediate Long Wave model. We also discuss the (gl(m),gl(n)) duality of XXZ models in quantum toroidal setting and the implications for the quantum KdV model. In particular, we conjecture that the spectrum of non-local integrals of motion of Bazhanov, Lukyanov, and Zamolodchikov is described by Gaudin Bethe ansatz equations associated to affine sl(2).
In physics, one is often misled in thinking that the mathematical model of a system is part of or is that system itself. Think of expressions commonly used in physics like point particle, motion on the line, smooth observables, wave function, and even going to infinity, without forgetting perplexing phrases like classical world versus quantum world.... On the other hand, when a mathematical model becomes really inoperative with regard to correct predictions, one is forced to replace it with a new one. It is precisely what happened with the emergence of quantum physics. Classical models were (progressively) superseded by quantum ones through quantization prescriptions. These procedures appear often as ad hoc recipes. In the present paper, well defined quantizations, based on integral calculus and Weyl-Heisenberg symmetry, are described in simple terms through one of the most basic examples of mechanics. Starting from (quasi-) probability distribution(s) on the Euclidean plane viewed as the phase space for the motion of a point particle on the line, i.e., its classical model, we will show how to build corresponding quantum model(s) and associated probabilities (e.g. Husimi) or quasi-probabilities (e.g. Wigner) distributions. We highlight the regularizing role of such procedures with the familiar example of the motion of a particle with a variable mass and submitted to a step potential.
The proposal made 50 years ago by Schulman (1968), Laidlaw & Morette-DeWitt (1971) and Dowker (1972) to decompose the propagator according to the homotopy classes of paths was a major breakthrough: it showed how Feynman functional integrals opened a direct window on quantum properties of topological origin in the configuration space. This paper casts a critical look at the arguments brought by this series of papers and its numerous followers in an attempt to clarify the reason why the emergence of the unitary linear representation of the first homotopy group is not only sufficient but also necessary.
We show that the generalization of the relative entropy of a resource from states to channels is not unique, and there are at least six such generalizations. We then show that two of these generalizations are asymptotically continuous, satisfy a version of the asymptotic equipartition property, and their regularizations appear in the power exponent of channe
Bayesian estimation of a mixed quantum state can be approximated via maximum likelihood (MaxLike) estimation when the likelihood function is sharp around its maximum. Such approximations rely on asymptotic expansions of multi-dimensional Laplace integrals. When this maximum is on the boundary of the integration domain, as it is the case when the MaxLike quantum state is not full rank, such expansions are not standard. We provide here such expansions, even when this maximum does not belong to the smooth part of the boundary, as it is the case when the rank deficiency exceeds two. These expansions provide, aside the MaxLike estimate of the quantum state, confidence intervals for any observable. They confirm the formula proposed and used without precise mathematical justifications by the authors in an article recently published in Physical Review A.