Quantum mechanics using two auxiliary inner products

Tong Wan, Gina Passante, Peter S. Shaffer

Libing Chen, Haiping Lu

We propose a scheme for Alice to change remotely and conclusively the overlap between Bob’s two nonorthogonal qubit states with a finite probability of success. The remote nonunitary evolution of Bob’s primary system could be generated by performing a proper nonlocal unitary transformation on Bob’s primary system and Alice’s auxiliary system, followed by a local von Neumann projective measurement on Alice’s ancilla. The various desired inner product modifications between Bob’s primary states can be efficiently and fully controlled by Alice’s auxiliary states. We build a quantum network for implementing rapidly the remote nonunitary transformation, and thus provide a feasible physical means to realize the remote and controllable inner product modification. This scheme is feasible for current experimental technology.

Tilak Sinha

From here, we take up the task of reformulating quantum mechanics in the language of inner product space. We start by introducing vector space through the familiar example of a set of finite dimensional, complex, column matrices under addition and multiplication by scalars. The inner product is then introduced as a dot product generalized to complex vectors leading to the idea of an inner product space . This is adequate to show how the concept of a quantum state can be described by a normalized vector in an inner product space so that the state space can be identified with the inner product space. Amplitudes are associated with inner products , and observables with orthonormal bases in this space. Hence the laws of quantum mechanics are reformulated. We then point out that the now reformulated laws are independent of the space of description and the reader is urged to contemplate an universality which would reflect the independence with respect to the representation space . This creates the stage for the introduction of the abstract inner product space and the formulation of quantum mechanics in this setting. The chapter concludes with this description. The transformed laws are now called postulatesof quantum mechanics .

Miloslav Znojil

Abstract In 1992, Scholtz et al. ( Ann. Phys., 213 (1992) 74) showed that a set of non-Hermitian operators can represent observables of a closed unitary quantum system, provided only that its elements are quasi-Hermitian ( i.e. , roughly speaking, Hermitian with respect to an ad hoc inner-product metric). We show that such a version of quantum mechanics admits a simultaneous closed-form representation of the metric and of the observables , in terms of auxiliary operators Z k with . At N = 2 the formalism degenerates to the well-known quantum mechanics using factorized metric , where is parity and where is charge.