Classical perspectives on the Newton--Wigner position observable
Mathematical Physics
2020-10-19 v3 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
math.MP
History and Philosophy of Physics
Abstract
This paper deals with the Newton--Wigner position observable for Poincar\'e-invariant classical systems. We prove an existence and uniqueness theorem for elementary systems that parallels the well-known Newton--Wigner theorem in the quantum context. We also discuss and justify the geometric interpretation of the Newton--Wigner position as `centre of spin', already proposed by Fleming in 1965 again in the quantum context.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2004.09723,
title = {Classical perspectives on the Newton--Wigner position observable},
author = {Philip K. Schwartz and Domenico Giulini},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.09723},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
28+5+4 pages (main text, references, appendices), to appear in International Journal of Geometric Methods in Modern Physics. v2: Added references, corrected typos, restructured references v3: Corrected typos, changed MSC class (better-fitting class in MSC2020)