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arXiv:1907.06624 · Nonlinearity

Madelung transform and probability densities in hybrid quantum–classical dynamics

François Gay–Balmaz, Cesare Tronci

Published Sep 2, 2020• 30 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Abstract This paper extends the Madelung–Bohm formulation of quantum mechanics to describe the time-reversible interaction of classical and quantum systems. The symplectic geometry of the Madelung transform leads to identifying hybrid quantum–classical Lagrangian paths extending the Bohmian trajectories from standard quantum theory. As the classical symplectic form is no longer preserved, the nontrivial evolution of the Poincaré integral is presented explicitly. Nevertheless, the classical phase-space components of the hybrid Bohmian trajectory identify a Hamiltonian flow parameterized by the quantum coordinate and this flow is associated to the motion of the classical subsystem. In addition, the continuity equation of the joint quantum–classical density is presented explicitly. While the von Neumann density operator of the quantum subsystem is always positive-definite by construction, the hybrid density is generally allowed to be unsigned. However, the paper concludes by presenting an infinite family of hybrid Hamiltonians whose corresponding evolution preserves the sign of the probability density for the classical subsystem.

DOI
10.1088/1361-6544/aba233

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Abstract This paper extends the Madelung–Bohm formulation of quantum mechanics to describe the time-reversible interaction of classical and quantum systems. The symplectic geometry of the Madelung transform leads to identifying hybrid quantum–classical Lagrangian paths extending the Bohmian trajectories from standard quantum theory. As the classical symplectic form is no longer preserved, the nontrivial evolution of the Poincaré integral is presented explicitly. Nevertheless, the classical phase-space components of the hybrid Bohmian trajectory identify a Hamiltonian flow parameterized by the quantum coordinate and this flow is associated to the motion of the classical subsystem. In addition, the continuity equation of the joint quantum–classical density is presented explicitly. While the von Neumann density operator of the quantum subsystem is always positive-definite by construction, the hybrid density is generally allowed to be unsigned. However, the paper concludes by presenting an infinite family of hybrid Hamiltonians whose corresponding evolution preserves the sign of the probability density for the classical subsystem.
A gauge-invariant wave equation for the dynamics of hybrid quantum–classical systems is formulated by combining the variational setting of Lagrangian paths in continuum theories with Koopman wavefunctions in classical mechanics. We identify gauge transformations with unobservable phase factors in the classical phase-space and we introduce gauge invariance in the variational principle underlying a hybrid wave equation previously proposed by the authors. While the original construction ensures a positive-definite quantum density matrix, the present model also guarantees the same property for the classical Liouville density. After a suitable wavefunction factorization, gauge invariance is achieved by resorting to the classical Lagrangian paths made available by the Madelung transform of Koopman wavefunctions. Due to the appearance of a phase-space analogue of the Berry connection, the new hybrid wave equation is highly nonlinear and it is proposed here as a platform for further developments in quantum–classical dynamics. Indeed, the associated model is Hamiltonian and appears to be the first to ensure a series of consistency properties beyond positivity of quantum and classical densities. For example, the model possesses a quantum–classical Poincaré integral invariant and its special cases include both the mean-field model and the Ehrenfest model from chemical physics.
This work presents a reconstruction of quantum mechanics in which Schrödinger-type dynamics emerges from reversible probabilistic evolution rather than being postulated. Starting from a normalized probability density, we impose reversible probability dynamics, Fisher information geometry, and classical correspondence. These compatibility conditions yield coupled real equations equivalent to the continuity equation and the Hamilton–Jacobi equation with an additional information curvature (quantum potential) term. By combining density and phase into a complex amplitude, the Schrödinger equation appears as a compact encoding of reversible statistical flow. The result is mathematically equivalent to the Madelung hydrodynamic formulation and structurally connected to Bohmian mechanics, but derived without assuming Hilbert space, operator axioms, or measurement postulates. The work can therefore be viewed as an information-geometric derivation of quantum dynamics: quantum theory arises as the unique consistent representation of reversible probability flow. Keywords: quantum foundations, quantum reconstruction, emergent quantum mechanics, derivation of the Schrödinger equation, information geometry, Fisher information, Hamilton–Jacobi theory, Madelung formulation, Bohmian mechanics, reversible probability dynamics
Abstract Quantum trajectory techniques have been used in the theory of open systems as a starting point for numerical computations and to describe the monitoring of a quantum system in continuous time. We extend this technique to develop a general approach to the dynamics of quantum/classical hybrid systems. By using two coupled stochastic differential equations, we can describe a classical component and a quantum one which have their own intrinsic dynamics and which interact with each other. A mathematically rigorous construction is given, under the restriction of having a Markovian joint dynamics and of involving only bounded operators on the Hilbert space of the quantum component. An important feature is that, if the interaction allows for a flow of information from the quantum component to the classical one, necessarily the dynamics is dissipative. We show also how this theory is connected to a suitable hybrid dynamical semigroup, which reduces to a quantum dynamical semigroup in the purely quantum case and includes Liouville and Kolmogorov–Fokker–Planck equations in the purely classical case. Moreover, this semigroup allows to compare the proposed stochastic dynamics with various other proposals based on hybrid master equations. Some simple examples are constructed in order to show the variety of physical behaviors which can be described; in particular, a model presenting hidden entanglement is introduced.
General statistical ensembles in the Hamiltonian formulation of hybrid quantum-classical systems are analyzed. It is argued that arbitrary probability densities on the hybrid phase space must be considered as the class of possible physically distinguishable statistical ensembles of hybrid systems. Nevertheless, statistical operators associated with the hybrid system and with the quantum subsystem can be consistently defined. Dynamical equations for the statistical operators representing the mixed states of the hybrid system and its quantum subsystem are derived and analyzed. In particular, these equations irreducibly depend on the total probability density on the hybrid phase space.
We develop a Bayesian formulation of diffusive quantum-classical dynamics by treating the wave function and classical variables as components of an ordinary stochastic process. The joint probability density P(psi,x,t) obeys a classical Fokker-Planck equation, while the quantum state appears as its second moment. Requiring autonomous second-moment evolution and trace preservation, together with a full-column-rank quantum-classical noise correlation matrix, forces the ensemble dynamics into hybrid Lindblad form. The same result also determines the general class of diffusive stochastic unravelings compatible with this hybrid evolution. Notably, this construction makes positivity immediate and does not take complete positivity or an underlying unitary quantum dilation as assumptions, but instead relies on the presence of a sufficiently coupled classical sector. We formulate quantum measurement, filtering and smoothing of hybrid quantum-classical dynamics as standard Bayesian inference and show how to correlation between the quantum and classical noise fully explains the differences between quantum smoothing and smoothing in classical time series models. We recover the stochastic master equation from the Kushner-Stratonovich equation with correlated noise and show how the quantum effect operator is related to the Bayesian backward message through the adjoint dynamics of the linear unraveling. The Bayesian posterior also defines a smoothed density matrix and, more generally, a posterior distribution over latent quantum-classical trajectories. These quantities can be approximated with standard particle filtering and smoothing methods. Numerical examples show that smoothing improves reconstruction of a hidden quantum-classical trajectory and that the full trajectory posterior can retain structure, such as multimodality, that is absent from its density-matrix second moment.
Quantum hydrodynamics described by Madelung equations is analyzed in the framework of symplectic geometry i.e. in covariant phase space approach to geometric field theory. The pre-symplectic manifolds providing the phase spaces describing the Hamiltonian dynamics of quantum fluid are constructed from the set of all solutions of Madelung equations and their corresponding Lagrangian densities. The Madelung equations under consideration are the Madelung equations associated to Schroedinger equations (in the nonrelativistic case) and Madelung equations associated to Klein–Gordon equations (in the relativistic case). The cases where the coupling with electromagnetic fields is present are also considered here. Our symplectic formulation is different from that of [M. Spera, Moment map and gauge geometric aspects of the Schrodinger and Pauli equations, Int. J. Geom. Methods Mod. Phys. 13 (2016) 1–36] in the choice of fundamental fields or variables. Here we regard density function [Formula: see text] and phase function [Formula: see text] not as canonical pair but as the fundamental fields of the theory. The Hamiltonian vector fields corresponding to an observable are obtained from the Hamiltonian equation generated by the observable. The Poisson bracket of two observables then is determined by the Hamiltonian vector fields associated to each observable. In general, the Poisson bracket of two observables is not unique due to the fact that every observable has more than one corresponding Hamiltonian vector field. It is pointed out that the Poisson bracket has a unique value over a certain subset of the set of all observables defined on the pre-symplectic manifold of the Madelung equation under consideration.