A Golden-Thompson inequality in supersymmetric quantum mechanics

M. Kibler, Mohammed Daoud A

Asao Arai

For a general class of boson–fermion Hamiltonians H acting in the tensor product Hilbert space L2(ℝn) ⊗ ∧(ℂr) of L2(ℝn) and the fermion Fock space ∧(ℂr) over ℂr(n, r ∈ ℕ), we establish, in terms of an n-dimensional conditional oscillator measure, a functional integral representation for the trace Tr (F ⊗ zN f e-tH)(F ∈ L∞(ℝn), z ∈ ℂ∖{0}, t > 0), where N f is the fermion number operator on ∧(ℂr). We prove a Golden–Thompson type inequality for | Tr (F ⊗ zN f e-tH)|. Also we discuss applications to a model in supersymmetric quantum mechanics and present an improved version of the Golden–Thompson inequality in supersymmetric quantum mechanics given by Klimek and Lesniewski ([Lett. Math. Phys.21 (1991) 237–244]). An upper bound for the number of the supersymmetric states is given as well as a sufficient condition for the spontaneous supersymmetry breaking. Moreover, we derive a functional integral representation for the analytical index of a Dirac type operator on ℝn (Witten index) associated with the supersymmetric quantum mechanical model.

Asao Arai

Some aspects of Golden-Thompson type inequalities for a boson system with finite degrees of freedom are reviewed.Then a general class of boson-fermion systems with finite degrees of freedom, including supersymmetric ones, is considered.Functional integral representations for the partition function as well as related objects of a boson- fermion system are derived and applied to obtain Golden-Thompson type inequalities.The present article is intended to be a review paper, but, includes new results which are extensions of some results obtained in a previous paper (A.Arai, Rev. Math.

A. Frank, P. Van Isacker, Jan Jolie

Eric A. Carlen, Élliott H. Lieb

The Golden–Thompson trace inequality, which states that Tr eH+K ≤ Tr eHeK, has proved to be very useful in quantum statistical mechanics. Golden used it to show that the classical free energy is less than the quantum one. Here, we make this G–T inequality more explicit by proving that for some operators, notably the operators of interest in quantum mechanics, H = Δ or H=−−Δ+m and K = potential, Tr eH+(1−u)KeuK is a monotone increasing function of the parameter u for 0 ≤ u ≤ 1. Our proof utilizes an inequality of Ando, Hiai, and Okubo (AHO): Tr XsYtX1−sY1−t ≤ Tr XY for positive operators X, Y and for 12≤s,t≤1, and s+t≤32. The obvious conjecture that this inequality should hold up to s + t ≤ 1 was proved false by Plevnik [Indian J. Pure Appl. Math. 47, 491–500 (2016)]. We give a different proof of AHO and also give more counterexamples in the 32,1 range. More importantly, we show that the inequality conjectured in AHO does indeed hold in the full range if X, Y have a certain positivity property—one that does hold for quantum mechanical operators, thus enabling us to prove our G–T monotonicity theorem.

Fred Cooper, Avinash Khare, U. Sukhatme