Observables in the General Boundary Formulation
Abstract
We develop a notion of quantum observable for the general boundary formulation of quantum theory. This notion is adapted to spacetime regions rather than to hypersurfaces and naturally fits into the topological quantum field theory like axiomatic structure of the general boundary formulation. We also provide a proposal for a generalized concept of expectation value adapted to this type of observable. We show how the standard notion of quantum observable arises as a special case together with the usual expectation values. We proceed to introduce various quantization schemes to obtain such quantum observables including path integral quantization (yielding the time-ordered product), Berezin-Toeplitz (antinormal ordered) quantization and normal ordered quantization, and discuss some of their properties.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1101.0367,
title = {Observables in the General Boundary Formulation},
author = {Robert Oeckl},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1101.0367},
year = {2012}
}
Comments
20 pages, LaTeX + AMS + birkjour (included), contribution to the proceedings of the conference "Quantum Field Theory and Gravity" (Regensburg, 2010); v2: minor corrections