Imperial/TP/98–99/13. The action operator for continuous-time histories

K. Savvidou

Published Jan 1, 1998• 0 citations

Abstract

We define the action operator for the consistent histories formalism, as the quantum analogue of the classical action functional, for the simple harmonic oscillator case. We conclude that the action operator is the generator of time transformations, and is associated with the two types of time-evolution of the standard quantum theory: the wave-packet reduction and the unitary time-evolution. We construct the corresponding classical histories and demonstrate the relevance with the quantum histories. Finally, we show the relation of the action operator to the decoherence functional. 1

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