Coherent Spaces

Arnold Neumaier, Arash Ghaani Farashahi

Abstract This paper studies coherent quantization, the way operators in the quantum space of a coherent space—defined in the recent book ’Coherent Quantum Mechanics’ by the first author—can be studied in terms of objects defined directly on the coherent space. The results may be viewed as a generalization of geometric quantization, including the non-unitary case. Care has been taken to work with the weakest meaningful topology and to assume as little as possible about the spaces and groups involved. Unlike in geometric quantization, the groups are not assumed to be compact, locally compact, or finite-dimensional. This implies that the setting can be successfully applied to quantum field theory, where the groups involved satisfy none of these properties. The paper characterizes linear operators acting on the quantum space of a coherent space in terms of their coherent matrix elements. Coherent maps and associated symmetry groups for coherent spaces are introduced, and formulas are derived for the quantization of coherent maps. The importance of coherent maps for quantum mechanics is due to the fact that there is a quantization map that associates homomorphically with every coherent map a linear operator from the quantum space into itself. The quantization map generalizes the second quantization procedure for free classical fields to symmetry groups of general coherent spaces. Field quantization is obtained by specialization to Klauder spaces, whose quantum spaces are the bosonic Fock spaces. Implied by the new approach is a short, coordinate-free derivation of all basic properties of creation and annihilation operators in Fock spaces.

Arnold Neumaier

Coherent quantum physics is quantum physics in terms of a coherent space and an appropriate coherent product. The kinematical structure and the meaning of the quantities are given by the symmetries (invertible coherent maps) of the coherent space. If Z is a coherent manifold, a canonical symplectic form is often canonically determined by the coherent product through the coherent action principle discussed in Section 6.1. In a quantum mechanical context, Z is indeed a classical phase space or an extended phase space-typically a symplectic manifold, a Poisson manifold, or a circle or line bundle over such a manifold that incorporates the classical action variable (encoding the Berry phase under quantization). For example, the Aharonov-Bohm effect [3] needs the bundle formulation. A coherent space and its quantum space provide a classical and a quantum view of the same physical system, discussed in Section 6.2. Section 6.3 shows that symmetries of coherent spaces can be quantized, that is, promoted to linear operators on the quantum space. This leads to quantum dynamics, which in special (completely integrable) situations can be solved in closed form in terms of classical motions on the underlying coherent space, if the latter has a compatible manifold structure. Close relations to concepts from geometric quantization and Kähler manifolds are pointed out in Section 6.4. In order that the quantum space of a coherent space Z can describe physics, one needs not only a distinguished class of coherent states but a more general concept of state. In Sections 6.5-6.6, we give a general abstract setting for states in Lie ∗-algebras, emphasize the essential mathematical features and the close analogy between classical and quantum physics. We illustrate these generalities with a number of examples in Section 6.7. The coherent action principle is put to use in Section 6.8 for numerical quantum physics and an application to quantum chaos. Spectral issues can, in favorable cases, be handled in terms of dynamical Lie algebras, discussed in Section 6.9.

Arnold Neumaier, Phillip Josef Bachler, Arash Ghaani Farashahi

This paper defines coherent manifolds and discusses their properties and their application in quantum mechanics. Every coherent manifold with a large group of symmetries gives rise to a Hilbert space, the completed quantum space of $Z$, which contains a distinguished family of coherent states labeled by the points of the manifold. The second quantization map in quantum field theory is generalized to quantization operators on arbitrary coherent manifolds. It is shown how the Schrödinger equation on any such completed quantum space can be solved in terms of computations only involving the coherent product. In particular, this applies to a description of Bosonic Fock spaces as completed quantum spaces of a class of coherent manifolds called Klauder spaces.

Carlo Rovelli C