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Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A Mathematical Physical and Engineering Sciences

A short walk in quantum probability

R. L. Hudson

Published Mar 19, 2018• 16 citations
Publisher

Abstract

This is a personal survey of aspects of quantum probability related to the Heisenberg commutation relation for canonical pairs. Using the failure, in general, of non-negativity of the Wigner distribution for canonical pairs to motivate a more satisfactory quantum notion of joint distribution, we visit a central limit theorem for such pairs and a resulting family of quantum planar Brownian motions which deform the classical planar Brownian motion, together with a corresponding family of quantum stochastic areas.This article is part of the themed issue 'Hilbert's sixth problem'.

DOI
10.1098/rsta.2017.0226

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This is a personal survey of aspects of quantum probability related to the Heisenberg commutation relation for canonical pairs. Using the failure, in general, of non-negativity of the Wigner distribution for canonical pairs to motivate a more satisfactory quantum notion of joint distribution, we visit a central limit theorem for such pairs and a resulting family of quantum planar Brownian motions which deform the classical planar Brownian motion, together with a corresponding family of quantum stochastic areas.This article is part of the themed issue 'Hilbert's sixth problem'.
The fact that any classical random variable with all moments has a quantum decomposition allows to associate to it a family of quantum moments. On the other hand, a classical random variable may have several inequivalent quantum decompositions, which lead to the same classical, but different quantum moments. Even in the simplest Central Limit Theorems (CLT), i.e. those of Bernoulli type, there are examples in which the corresponding quantum moments converge to the canonical quantum moments of the associated classical random variable, and examples in which this is not the case. This poses the problem to find a constructive criterium that characterizes the quantum moments associated to the canonical quantum decomposition (which is unique) with respect to the other ones. Theorem [Formula: see text] of the present paper provides such a criterium. Theorem [Formula: see text] deals with the case when one knows a priori that the quantum moments come from a central limit theorem (the motivation of the present paper arose in this context). It gives only a sufficient condition, but simpler to verify than the necessary and sufficient conditions of Theorem [Formula: see text]. Theorem [Formula: see text] naturally leads to a classification of Interacting Fock Spaces (IFS) into three types. We construct examples showing that all these possibilities can effectively take place. On the way, we prove that all the best known deformations of Heisenberg commutation relations can be obtained as special cases of a general construction within the algebraic approach to the theory of orthogonal polynomials.
We survey some results obtained in the last 25 years to illustrate the following probabilistic quantization statement: quantum probability is not a generalization of classical probability but a deeper level of it. Generalizing the classical theory of orthogonal polynomials, one can show that any random field XXX admitting all the moments can be represented as the sum of three operators, which are natural extensions of the creation, annihilation, and preservation operators in the usual boson Fock quantum theory. These operators generate a noncommutative ∗*∗-algebra on which the quantum extension of the expected value relative to the probability distribution of the field XXX induces a quantum state. So, any classical algebraic probability space generates a quantum space with its own commutation relations. The Heisenberg commutation relation characterizes the classical fields, while the new type of commutation relations (of type II) appears in non-Gaussian cases. The same machinery, but applied to Bernoulli fields, leads to Fermi-Dirac anticommutation relations (see the introduction).
We survey some results obtained in the last 25 years to illustrate the following probabilistic quantization statement: quantum probability is not a generalization of classical probability but a deeper level of it. Generalizing the classical theory of orthogonal polynomials, one can show that any random field XXX admitting all the moments can be represented as the sum of three operators, which are natural extensions of the creation, annihilation, and preservation operators in the usual boson Fock quantum theory. These operators generate a noncommutative ∗*∗-algebra on which the quantum extension of the expected value relative to the probability distribution of the field XXX induces a quantum state. So, any classical algebraic probability space generates a quantum space with its own commutation relations. The Heisenberg commutation relation characterizes the classical fields, while the new type of commutation relations (of type II) appears in non-Gaussian cases. The same machinery, but applied to Bernoulli fields, leads to Fermi--Dirac anticommutation relations (see the introduction).
We replace the independent one-dimensional Brownian motions in the de…nition of classical Levy area by the mutually noncommuting momentum and position Brownian motions of non-Fock quantum stochastic calculus, which are independent in the sense of factorisation of joint characteristic functions. The corresponding quantum Levy area can then be constructed in a way similar to Levy’s original construction as a quantum martingale limit. Acknowledgement 1 The author thanks the referee for drawing his attention to a number of mistypes. 1 Introduction. Levy’s stochastic area [10], [11], as well as being of great intrinsic interest and possessing numerous connections with classical mathematical analysis and mathematical physics [7], has recently come to prominence in the theory of rough paths [12], [13], [5]. Here we present a quantum or noncommutative version of Levy area in which the two independent one-dimensional Brownian motions used to de…ne it are replaced by the pair of quantum Brownian motions (P;Q) ; forming the quantum Wiener process of [2]. Each of P and Q consists of a process of mutually commuting self-adjoint operators which can be simultaneously diagonalised as multiplication by a classical Brownian motion of appropriate variance in the Hilbert space of complex-valued functions square-integrable with respect to Wiener measure, But P and Q together satisfy the commutation relation P (s)Q(t) Q(t)P (s) = imin fs; tg I; (1)