Automatic hermiticity for mixed states
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 that makes a given non-normal Hamiltonian normal by using an appropriately chosen Hermitian operator . 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 but also a future state at the final time 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 matches a normalized matrix element of . We argue that the skew density matrix defined with at the present time for large and large approximately corresponds to another density matrix composed of only an ensemble of past states and defined with another inner product for large .
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