General Formulation of Quantum Mechanics and Examples

Nuno Costa Dias, João Nuno Prata

The Weyl-Wigner map yields the entire structure of Moyal quantum mechanics directly from the standard operator formulation. The covariant generalization of Moyal theory, also known as Vey quantum mechanics, was presented in the literature many years ago. However, a derivation of the formalism directly from standard operator quantum mechanics, clarifying the relation between the two formulations is still missing. In this paper we present a covariant generalization of the Weyl order prescription and of the Weyl-Wigner map and use them to derive Vey quantum mechanics directly from the standard operator formulation. The procedure displays some interesting features: it yields all the key ingredients and provides a more straightforward interpretation of the Vey theory including a direct implementation of unitary operator transformations as phase space coordinate transformations in the Vey idiom. These features are illustrated through a simple example. 1

Nuno Costa Dias, João Nuno Prata

The Weyl–Wigner map yields the entire structure of Moyal quantum mechanics directly from the standard operator formulation. The covariant generalization of Moyal theory, also known as Vey quantum mechanics, was presented in the literature many years ago. However, a derivation of the formalism directly from standard operator quantum mechanics, clarifying the relation between the two formulations, is still missing. In this article we present a covariant generalization of the Weyl order prescription and of the Weyl–Wigner map and use them to derive Vey quantum mechanics directly from the standard operator formulation. The procedure displays some interesting features: it yields all the key ingredients and provides a more straightforward interpretation of the Vey theory including a direct implementation of unitary operator transformations as phase space coordinate transformations in the Vey idiom. These features are illustrated through a simple example.

R. McWeeny

D Falco

The problem of a formulation of Nelson's (1967) stochastic mechanics of scalar fields in the context of general relativity is considered. The simple example of the scalar field in the Wightman vacuum state on the Rindler wedge is examined, the stochastic counterpart of the Fulling ambiguity of canonical quantisation is formulated, and the role of the stochastic mechanics of thermal mixtures, as formulated by Guerra and Loffredo (1981), is analysed, in the spirit of Davies (1975) and Unruh (1976), in the solution of the above ambiguity. An overall picture emerges which, both in the explicit example considered here and in its straightforward generalisations to static submanifolds of more general spacetimes, confirms Smolin's point of view that stochastic quantisation is a very natural conceptual frame in which to study the general non-covariance of the distinction between quantum and thermal fluctuations.