Representations of spacetime alternatives and their classical limits
- Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106-9530 (United States)
Different quantum mechanical operators can correspond to the same classical quantity. Hermitian operators differing only by operator ordering of the canonical coordinates and momenta at one moment of time are the most familiar example. Classical spacetime alternatives that extend over time can also be represented by different quantum operators. For example, operators representing a particular value of the time average of a dynamical variable can be constructed in two ways: first, as a projection onto the value of the time-averaged Heisenberg picture operator for the dynamical variable and, second, as the class operator defined by a sum over those histories of the dynamical variable that have the specified time-averaged value. We show by both explicit example and general argument that the predictions of these different representations agree in the classical limit and that sets of histories represented by them decohere in that limit.
- OSTI ID:
- 20718051
- Journal Information:
- Physical Review. A, Vol. 72, Issue 2; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.72.022105; (c) 2005 The American Physical Society; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 1050-2947
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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