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Physical Review A

Many-body quantum mechanics as a symplectic dynamical system

DAVID J. ROWE, A G Ryman, George Rosensteel

Published Dec 1, 1980• 115 citations
Publisher

Abstract

An approach is formulated to the problem of obtaining approximate solutions to many-body quantum mechanics. The starting point is the representation of quantum mechanics as Hamiltonian mechanics on a symplectic manifold (phase space). It is shown that Dirac's variation of an action integral provides a natural mechanism for constraining the dynamics to symplectic submanifolds and gives rise to a hierarchy of approximate many-body theories of which Hartree-Fock, random-phase approximation, time-dependent Hartree-Fock, and the double commutator equations of motion formalism are special cases.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.22.2362

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An approach is formulated to the problem of obtaining approximate solutions to many-body quantum mechanics. The starting point is the representation of quantum mechanics as Hamiltonian mechanics on a symplectic manifold (phase space). It is shown that Dirac's variation of an action integral provides a natural mechanism for constraining the dynamics to symplectic submanifolds and gives rise to a hierarchy of approximate many-body theories of which Hartree-Fock, random-phase approximation, time-dependent Hartree-Fock, and the double commutator equations of motion formalism are special cases.
Canonical coordinates for the Schrödinger equation are introduced, making more transparent its Hamiltonian structure. It is shown that the Schrödinger equation, considered as a classical field theory, shares with Liouville completely integrable field theories the existence of a recursion operator which allows for the infinitely many conserved functionals pairwise commuting with respect to the corresponding Poisson bracket. The approach may provide a good starting point to get a clear interpretation of Quantum Mechanics in the general setting, provided by Stone-von Neumann theorem, of Symplectic Mechanics. It may give new tools to solve in the general case the inverse problem of quantum mechanics whose solution is given up to now only for one-dimensional systems by the Gel’fand-Levitan-Marchenko formula. 1 Introduction. In the past few years there has been a renewed interest in completely integrable Hamiltonian systems, specially in connection with the study of integrable quantum
We study the algebra Sp(n,R) of the symplectic model, in particular for the cases n=1,2,3, in a new way. Starting from the Poisson-bracket realization we derive a set of partial differential equations for the generators as functions of classical canonical variables. We obtain a solution to these equations that represents the classical limit of a boson mapping of the algebra. We show further that this mapping plays a fundamental role in the collective description of many-fermion systems whose Hamiltonian may be approximated by polynomials in the associated algebra, as is done in the simplest versions of the symplectic model. The relationship to the collective dynamics is formulated as a theorem that associates the mapping with an exact solution of the time-dependent Hartree approximation. This solution determines a decoupled classical symplectic manifold, thus satisfying the criteria that define an exactly solvable model in the theory of large amplitude collective motion. The models thus obtained also provide a test of methods for constructing an approximately decoupled manifold in fully realistic cases. We show that an algorithm developed in one of our earlier works reproduces the main results of the theorem.
By placing emphasis on conceptual correspondence to the “classical” theory which has been developed within the framework of the time-dependent Hartree-Fock theory, a full quantum theory appropriate for describing large-amplitude collective motion is proposed. A central problem of the quantum theory is how to determine an optimal representation called a dynamical representation; the representation is specific for the collective subspace where the large-amplitue collective motion is replicated as satisfactoryly as possible. As an extension of the classical theory where the concept of an approximate integral surface plays an important role, the dynamical representation is properly characterized by introducing a concept of an approximate invariant subspace of the Hamiltonian.
We develop a mathematically well-defined path integral formalism for general symplectic manifolds. We argue that in order to make a path integral quantization covariant under general coordinate transformations on the phase space and involve a genuine functional measure that is both finite and countably additive, the phase space manifold should be equipped with a Riemannian structure (metric). A suitable method to calculate the metric is also proposed. 1. Most quantization formulations lead to correct results only when the system in question is expressed in one of a family of special (Cartesian) coordinate systems [1]. However, for Hamiltonian systems on a generic symplectic manifold, the canonical variables do not admit such special coordinates. Moreover classical Hamiltonian dynamics exhibits covariance under general coordinate transformations on the symplectic manifold, and, in this sense, is coordinate-free. This covariance is lost upon a formal phase-space path integral quantization. The reason is that the Hamiltonian action involves terms linear in the time derivatives and, therefore, its exponential (even in Euclidean time) does not induce a
We investigate variational principles for the approximation of quantum dynamics that apply for approximation manifolds that do not have complex linear tangent spaces. The first one, dating back to McLachlan [Mol. Phys. 8, 39–44 (1964)], minimizes the residuum of the time-dependent Schrödinger equation, while the second one, originating from the lecture notes of Kramer and Saraceno [Geometry of the Time-Dependent Variational Principle in Quantum Mechanics, Lecture Notes in Physics Vol. 140 (Springer, Berlin, 1981)], imposes the stationarity of an action functional. We characterize both principles in terms of metric and symplectic orthogonality conditions, consider their conservation properties, and derive an elementary a posteriori error estimate. As an application, we revisit the time-dependent Hartree approximation and frozen Gaussian wave packets.