English

The role of phase space geometry in Heisenberg's uncertainty relation

Quantum Physics 2016-09-08 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

Aiming towards a geometric description of quantum theory, we study the coherent states-induced metric on the phase space, which provides a geometric formulation of the Heisenberg uncertainty relations (both the position-momentum and the time-energy ones). The metric also distinguishes the original uncertainty relations of Heisenberg from the ones that are obtained from non-commutativity of operators. Conversely, the uncertainty relations can be written in terms of this metric only, hence they can be formulated for any physical system, including ones with non-trivial phase space. Moreover, the metric is a key ingredient of the probability structure of continuous-time histories on phase space. This fact allows a simple new proof the impossibility of the physical manifestation of the quantum Zeno and anti-Zeno paradoxes. Finally, we construct the coherent states for a spinless relativistic particle, as a non-trivial example by which we demonstrate our results.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.quant-ph/0304049,
  title  = {The role of phase space geometry in Heisenberg's uncertainty relation},
  author = {Charis Anastopoulos and Ntina Savvidou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:quant-ph/0304049},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

28 pages, latex