English

Banach space formalism of quantum mechanics

Quantum Physics 2023-06-12 v1 Mathematical Physics math.MP Operator Algebras

Abstract

This paper presents a generalization of quantum mechanics from conventional Hilbert space formalism to Banach space one. We construct quantum theory starting with any complex Banach space beyond a complex Hilbert space, through using a basic fact that a complex Banach space always admits a semi-inner product. Precisely, in a complex Banach space X\mathbb{X} with a given semi-inner product, a pure state is defined by Lumer \cite{Lumer1961} to be a bounded linear functional on the space of bounded operators determined by a normalized element of X\mathbb{X} under the semi-inner product, and then the state space S(X)\mathcal{S} (\mathbb{X}) of the system is the weakly closed convex set spanned by all pure states. Based on Lumer's notion of the state, we associate a quantum system with a complex Banach space X\mathbb{X} equipped with a fixed semi-inner product, and then define a physical event at a quantum state ωS(X)\omega \in \mathcal{S}(\mathbb{X}) to be a projection PP (bounded operator such that P2=PP^2 =P) in X\mathbb{X} satisfying the positivity condition 0ω(P)1,0 \le \omega (P) \le 1, and a physical quantity at a quantum state ω\omega to be a spectral operator of scalar type with real spectrum so that the associated spectral projections are all physical events at ω.\omega. The Born formula for measurement of a physical quantity is the natural pairing of operators with linear functionals satisfying the probability conservation law. A time evolution of the system is governed by a one-parameter group of invertible spectral operators determined by a scalar type operator with the real spectrum, which satisfies the Schr\"{o}dinger equation. Our formulation is just a generalization of the Dirac-von Neumann formalism of quantum mechanics to the Banach space setting. We include some examples for illustration.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2306.05630,
  title  = {Banach space formalism of quantum mechanics},
  author = {Zeqian Chen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.05630},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

8 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2111.12883