English

Automatic hermiticity for mixed states

High Energy Physics - Theory 2023-03-24 v2 Quantum Physics

Abstract

We previously proposed a mechanism to effectively obtain, after a long time development, a Hamiltonian being Hermitian with regard to a modified inner product IQI_Q that makes a given non-normal Hamiltonian normal by using an appropriately chosen Hermitian operator QQ. We studied it for pure states. In this letter we show that a similar mechanism also works for mixed states by introducing density matrices to describe them and investigating their properties explicitly both in the future-not-included and future-included theories. In particular, in the latter, where not only a past state at the initial time TAT_A but also a future state at the final time TBT_B is given, we study a couple of candidates for it, and introduce a ``skew density matrix'' composed of both ensembles of the future and past states such that the trace of the product of it and an operator O{\cal O} matches a normalized matrix element of O{\cal O}. We argue that the skew density matrix defined with IQI_Q at the present time tt for large TBtT_B-t and large tTAt-T_A approximately corresponds to another density matrix composed of only an ensemble of past states and defined with another inner product IQJI_{Q_J} for large tTAt-T_A.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2209.11619,
  title  = {Automatic hermiticity for mixed states},
  author = {Keiichi Nagao and Holger Bech Nielsen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.11619},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

Latex 14 pages, typos corrected, presentation improved, the final version to appear in Prog.Theor.Exp.Phys

R2 v1 2026-06-28T01:58:13.323Z