Maurice A De Gosson – författare

Quantum mechanics is arguably one of the most successful scientific theories ever and its applications to chemistry, optics, and information theory are innumerable. This book provides the reader with a rigorous treatment of the main mathematical tools from harmonic analysis which play an essential role in the modern formulation of quantum mechanics. This allows us at the same time to suggest some new ideas and methods, with a special focus on topics such as the Wigner phase space formalism and its applications to the theory of the density operator and its entanglement properties. This book can be used with profit by advanced undergraduate students in mathematics and physics, as well as by confirmed researchers.

Quantum mechanics is arguably one of the most successful scientific theories ever and its applications to chemistry, optics, and information theory are innumerable. This book provides the reader with a rigorous treatment of the main mathematical tools from harmonic analysis which play an essential role in the modern formulation of quantum mechanics. This allows us at the same time to suggest some new ideas and methods, with a special focus on topics such as the Wigner phase space formalism and its applications to the theory of the density operator and its entanglement properties. This book can be used with profit by advanced undergraduate students in mathematics and physics, as well as by confirmed researchers.

This book presents a comprehensive mathematical study of the operators behind the Born–Jordan quantization scheme. The Schrödinger and Heisenberg pictures of quantum mechanics are equivalent only if the Born–Jordan scheme is used. Thus, Born–Jordan quantization provides the only physically consistent quantization scheme, as opposed to the Weyl quantization commonly used by physicists. In this book we develop Born–Jordan quantization from an operator-theoretical point of view, and analyze in depth the conceptual differences between the two schemes. We discuss various physically motivated approaches, in particular the Feynman-integral point of view. One important and intriguing feature of Born-Jordan quantization is that it is not one-to-one: there are infinitely many classical observables whose quantization is zero.

The aim of this book is to give a rigorous and complete treatment of various topics from harmonic analysis with a strong emphasis on symplectic invariance properties, which are often ignored or underestimated in the time-frequency literature. The topics that are addressed include (but are not limited to) the theory of the Wigner transform, the uncertainty principle (from the point of view of symplectic topology), Weyl calculus and its symplectic covariance, Shubin’s global theory of pseudo-differential operators, and Feichtinger’s theory of modulation spaces. Several applications to time-frequency analysis and quantum mechanics are given, many of them concurrent with ongoing research. For instance, a non-standard pseudo-differential calculus on phase space where the main role is played by “Bopp operators” (also called “Landau operators” in the literature) is introduced and studied. This calculus is closely related to both the Landau problem and to the deformation quantization theory of Flato and Sternheimer, of which it gives a simple pseudo-differential formulation where Feichtinger’s modulation spaces are key actors.

This book is primarily directed towards students or researchers in harmonic analysis (in the broad sense) and towards mathematical physicists working in quantum mechanics. It can also be read with profit by researchers in time-frequency analysis, providing a valuable complement to the existing literature on the topic.

A certain familiarity with Fourier analysis (in the broad sense) and introductory functional analysis (e.g. the elementary theory of distributions) is assumed. Otherwise, the book is largely self-contained and includes an extensive list ofreferences.