Jacobi's Action and the Density of States
Abstract
The authors have introduced recently a ``microcanonical functional integral" which yields directly the density of states as a function of energy. The phase of the functional integral is Jacobi's action, the extrema of which are classical solutions at a given energy. This approach is general but is especially well suited to gravitating systems because for them the total energy can be fixed simply as a boundary condition on the gravitational field. In this paper, however, we ignore gravity and illustrate the use of Jacobi's action by computing the density of states for a nonrelativistic harmonic oscillator. (Festschrift for Dieter Brill)
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.gr-qc/9301018,
title = {Jacobi's Action and the Density of States},
author = {J. David Brown and James W. York},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:gr-qc/9301018},
year = {2008}
}
Comments
10 pages, plain tex. (This replaces the previous version which consisted of less than half of the manuscript.)