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Foundations of Physics

Born–Jordan Quantization and the Equivalence of the Schrödinger and Heisenberg Pictures

Maurice A. de Gosson

Published Sep 4, 2014• 24 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The aim of the famous Born and Jordan 1925 paper was to put Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics on a firm mathematical basis. Born and Jordan showed that if one wants to ensure energy conservation in Heisenberg’s theory it is necessary and sufficient to quantize observables following a certain ordering rule. One apparently unnoticed consequence of this fact is that Schrödinger’s wave mechanics cannot be equivalent to Heisenberg’s more physically motivated matrix mechanics unless its observables are quantized using this rule, and not the more symmetric prescription proposed by Weyl in 1926, which has become the standard procedure in quantum mechanics. This observation confirms the superiority of Born–Jordan quantization, as already suggested by Kauffmann. We also show how to explicitly determine the Born–Jordan quantization of arbitrary classical variables, and discuss the conceptual advantages in using this quantization scheme. We finally suggest that it might be possible to determine the correct quantization scheme by using the results of weak measurement experiments.

DOI
10.1007/s10701-014-9831-z

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The aim of the famous Born and Jordan 1925 paper was to put Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics on a firm mathematical basis. Born and Jordan showed that if one wants to ensure energy conservation in Heisenberg’s theory it is necessary and sufficient to quantize observables following a certain ordering rule. One apparently unnoticed consequence of this fact is that Schrödinger’s wave mechanics cannot be equivalent to Heisenberg’s more physically motivated matrix mechanics unless its observables are quantized using this rule, and not the more symmetric prescription proposed by Weyl in 1926, which has become the standard procedure in quantum mechanics. This observation confirms the superiority of Born–Jordan quantization, as already suggested by Kauffmann. We also show how to explicitly determine the Born–Jordan quantization of arbitrary classical variables, and discuss the conceptual advantages in using this quantization scheme. We finally suggest that it might be possible to determine the correct quantization scheme by using the results of weak measurement experiments.
The aim of the famous Born and Jordan 1925 paper was to put Heisenberg's matrix mechanics on a firm mathematical basis. Born and Jordan showed that if one wants to ensure energy conservation in Heisenberg's theory it is necessary and sufficient to quantize observables following a certain ordering rule. One apparently unnoticed consequence of this fact is that Schrödinger's wave mechanics cannot be equivalent to Heisenberg's more physically motivated matrix mechanics unless its observables are quantized using this rule, and not the more symmetric prescription proposed by Weyl in 1926, which has become the standard procedure in quantum mechanics. This observation confirms the superiority of Born-Jordan quantization, as already suggested by Kauffmann. We also show how to explicitly determine the Born--Jordan quantization of arbitrary classical variables, and discuss the conceptual advantages in using this quantization scheme. We finally suggest that it might be possible to determine the correct quantization scheme by using the results of weak measurement experiments.
We have shown in previous work that the equivalence of the Heisenberg and Schrödinger pictures of quantum mechanics requires the use of the Born and Jordan quantization rules. In the present work we give further evidence that the Born-Jordan rule is the correct quantization scheme for quantum mechanics. For this purpose we use correct short-time approximations to the action functional, initially due to Makri and Miller, and show that these lead to the desired quantization of the classical Hamiltonian.
The rigorous equivalence of the Schrödinger and Heisenberg pictures requires that one uses Born-Jordan quantization in place of Weyl quantization. We confirm this by showing that the much discussed " angular momentum dilemma" disappears if one uses Born-Jordan quantization. We argue that the latter is the only physically correct quantization procedure. We also briefly discuss a possible redefinition of phase space quantum mechanics, where the usual Wigner distribution has to be replaced with a new quasi-distribution associated with Born-Jordan quantization, and which has proven to be successful in time-frequency analysis.
Abstract One of the fundamental problems in quantum mechanics is finding the correct quantum image of a classical observable that would correspond to experimental measurements. We investigate for the appropriate quantization rule that would yield a Hamiltonian that obeys the quantum analogue of Hamilton’s equations of motion, which includes differentiation of operators with respect to another operator. To give meaning to this type of differentiation, Born and Jordan established two definitions called the differential quotients of first type and second type. In this paper we modify the definition for the differential quotient of first type and establish its consistency with the differential quotient of second type for different basis operators corresponding to different quantizations. Theorems and differentiation rules including differentiation of operators with negative powers and multiple differentiation were also investigated. We show that the Hamiltonian obtained from Weyl, simplest symmetric, and Born-Jordan quantization all satisfy the required algebra of the quantum equations of motion.