A Path Intergal Approach to Current

Abstract

Discontinuous initial wave functions or wave functions with discontintuous derivative and with bounded support arise in a natural way in various situations in physics, in particular in measurement theory. The propagation of such initial wave functions is not well described by the Schrödinger current which vanishes on the boundary of the support of the wave function. This propagation gives rise to a uni-directional current at the boundary of the support. We use path integrals to define current and uni-directional current and give a direct derivation of the expression for current from the path integral formulation for both diffusion and quantum mechanics. Furthermore, we give an explicit asymptotic expression for the short time propagation of initial wave function with compact support for both the cases of discontinuous derivative and discontinuous wave function. We show that in the former case the probability propagated across the boundary of the support in time $Δt$ is $O(Δt^{3/2})$ and the initial uni-directional current is $O(Δt^{1/2})$. This recovers the Zeno effect for continuous detection of a particle in a given domain. For the latter case the probability propagated across the boundary of the support in time $Δt$ is $O(Δt^{1/2})$ and the initial uni-directional current is $O(Δt^{-1/2})$. This is an anti-Zeno effect. However, the probability propagated across a point located at a finite distance from the boundary of the support is $O(Δt)$. This gives a decay law.