English

Differentiable-Path Integrals in Quantum Mechanics

Quantum Physics 2015-10-09 v2 High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

A method is presented which restricts the space of paths entering the path integral of quantum mechanics to subspaces of CαC^\alpha, by only allowing paths which possess at least α\alpha derivatives. The method introduces two external parameters, and induces the appearance of a particular time scale ϵD\epsilon_D such that for time intervals longer than ϵD\epsilon_D the model behaves as usual quantum mechanics. However, for time scales smaller than ϵD\epsilon_D, modifications to standard formulation of quantum theory occur. This restriction renders convergent some quantities which are usually divergent in the time-continuum limit ϵ0\epsilon\rightarrow 0. We illustrate the model by computing several meaningful physical quantities such as the mean square velocity v2\langle v^2 \rangle , the canonical commutator, the Schrodinger equation and the energy levels of the harmonic oscillator. It is shown that an adequate choice of the parameters introduced makes the evolution unitary.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1404.6551,
  title  = {Differentiable-Path Integrals in Quantum Mechanics},
  author = {Benjamin Koch and Ignacio Reyes},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1404.6551},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

29 pages 6 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T03:59:00.198Z