arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Maurice A. de Gosson.
We address the problem of the reconstruction of quantum covariance matrices using the notion of Lagrangian and symplectic polar duality introduced in previous work. We apply our constructions to Gaussian quantum states which leads to a non-trivial generalization of Pauli's reconstruction problem and we state a simple tomographic characterization of such states.
We study the symplectic Radon transform from the point of view of the metaplectic representation of the symplectic group and its action on the Lagrangian Grassmannian. We give rigorous proofs in the general setting of multi-dimensional quantum systems. We interpret the inverse Radon transform as a "demarginalization process" for the Wigner distribution. This work completes, by giving complete proofs, a previous Note.
We study the classical and semiclassical time evolutions of subsystems of a Hamiltonian system; this is done using a generalization of Heller's thawed Gaussian approximation introduced by Littlejohn. The key tool in our study is an extension of Gromov's "principle of the symplectic camel" obtained in collaboration with N. Dias and J. Prata. This extension says that the orthogonal projection of a symplectic phase space ball on a phase space with a smaller dimension also contains a symplectic ball with the same radius. In the quantum case, the radii of these symplectic balls are taken equal to sqrt(h_bar) and represent ellipsoids of minimum uncertainty, which we have called "quantum blobs" in previous work.
We show that every Gaussian mixed quantum state can be disentangled by conjugation with a metaplectic operator associated with a symplectic rotation. The main tools we use are the Werner-Wolf condition on covariance matrices and the symplectic covariance of Weyl quantization.
In the usual approaches to mechanics (classical or quantum) the primary object of interest is the Hamiltonian, from which one tries to deduce the solutions of the equations of motion (Hamilton or Schrödinger). In the present work we reverse this paradigm and view the motions themselves as being the primary objects. This is made possible by studying arbitrary phase space motions, not of points, but of (small) ellipsoids with the requirement that the symplectic capacity of these ellipsoids is preserved. This allows us to guide and control these motions as we like. In the classical case these ellipsoids correspond to a symplectic coarse graining of phase space, and in the quantum case they correspond to the "quantum blobs" we defined in previous work, and which can be viewed as minimum uncertainty phase space cells which are in a one-to-one correspondence with Gaussian pure states.
We study the orthogonal projections of symplectic balls in $\mathbb{R}^{2n}$ on complex subspaces. In particular we show that these projections are themselves symplectic balls under a certain complexity assumption. Our main result is a refinement of a recent very interesting result of Abbondandolo and Matveyev extending the linear version of Gromov's non-squeezing theorem. We use a conceptually simpler approach where the Schur complement of a matrix plays a central role.
We will study rigorously the notion of mixed states and their density operators (or matrices.) We will also discuss the quantum-mechanical consequences of possible variations of Planck's constant h. This Review has been written having in mind two readerships: mathematical physicists and quantum physicists. The mathematical rigor is maximal, but the language and notation we use throughout should be familiar to physicists.
We prove, using symplectic methods and The Wigner formalism, a refinement of a criterion due to Werner and Wolf for the separability of bipartite Gaussian mixed states in an arbitrary number of dimensions. We use our result to show that one can characterize separability by comparing these states with separable pure Gaussian states.
Gaussian states are at the heart of quantum mechanics and play an essential role in quantum information processing. In this paper we provide approximation formulas for the expansion of a general Gaussian symbol in terms of elementary Gaussian functions. For this purpose we introduce the notion of a "phase space frame" associated with a Weyl-Heisenberg frame. Our results give explicit formulas for approximating general Gaussian symbols in phase space by phase space shifted standard Gaussians as well as explicit error estimates and the asymptotic behavior of the approximation.
We propose a refinement of the Robertson-Schrodinger uncertainty principle (RSUP) using Wigner distributions. This new principle is stronger than the RSUP. In particular, and unlike the RSUP, which can be saturated by many phase space functions, the refined RSUP can be saturated by pure Gaussian Wigner functions only. Moreover, the new principle is technically as simple as the standard RSUP. In addition, it makes a direct connection with modern harmonic analysis, since it involves the Wigner transform and its symplectic Fourier transform, which is the radar ambiguity function. As a by-product of the refined RSUP, we derive inequalities involving the entropy and the covariance matrix of Wigner distributions. These inequalities refine the Shanon and the Hirschman inequalities for the Wigner distribution of a mixed quantum state $ρ$. We prove sharp estimates which critically depend on the purity of $ρ$ and which are saturated in the Gaussian case.
We have shown in previous work that the equivalence of the Heisenberg and Schrödinger pictures of quantum mechanics requires the use of the Born and Jordan quantization rules. In the present work, we give further evidence that the Born--Jordan rule is the correct quantization scheme for quantum mechanics. For this purpose, we use correct short-time approximations to the action functional, which lead to the desired quantization of the classical Hamiltonian. We thus prove that a previous argument of Kerner and Sutcliffe, refuted by Cohen, is correct.
We consider Hamiltonian deformations of Gabor systems, where the window evolves according to the action of a Schrödinger propagator and the phase-space nodes evolve according to the corresponding Hamiltonian flow. We prove the stability of the frame property for small times and Hamiltonians consisting of a quadratic polynomial plus a potential in the Sjöstrand class with bounded second order derivatives. This answers a question raised in [de Gosson, M. Symplectic and Hamiltonian Deformations of Gabor Frames. Appl. Comput. Harmon. Anal. Vol. 38 No.2, (2015) p.196--221.]
In a recent paper in Appl. Comput. Harmon. Anal. 38(2), 196--221 (2014) we have introduced and studied the notion of weak Hamiltonian deformation of a Gabor (=Weyl-Heisenberg) frame. In this Note we use these results to prove that one can modify the window of a Gabor frame using certain metaplectic operators provided that one modifies only a finite number of points of the frame lattice.
We have shown in previous work that the rigorous equivalence of the Schrödinger and Heisenberg pictures requires that one uses Born-Jordan quantization in place of Weyl quantization. It also turns out that the so-called Dahl-Springborg angular momentum dilemma disappears if one uses Born--Jordan quantization. These two facts strongly suggest that the latter is the only true quantization procedure, and this leads to a redefinition of phase space quantum mechanics, where the usual Wigner distribution has to be replaced with a new distribution.
In their simplest formulations, classical dynamics is the study of Hamiltonian flows and quantum mechanics that of propagators. Both are linked, and emerge from the datum of a single classical concept, the Hamiltonian function. We study and emphasize the analogies between Hamiltonian flows and quantum propagators; this allows us to verify G. Mackey's observation that quantum mechanics (in its Weyl formulation) is a refinement of Hamiltonian mechanics. We discuss in detail the metaplectic representation, which very explicitly shows the close relationship between classical mechanics and quantum mechanics, the latter emerging from the first by lifting Hamiltonian flows to the double covering of the symplectic group. We also give explicit formulas for the factorization of Hamiltonian flows into simpler flows, and prove a quantum counterpart of these results.
The aim of the famous Born and Jordan 1925 paper was to put Heisenberg's matrix mechanics on a firm mathematical basis. Born and Jordan showed that if one wants to ensure energy conservation in Heisenberg's theory it is necessary and sufficient to quantize observables following a certain ordering rule. One apparently unnoticed consequence of this fact is that Schrödinger's wave mechanics cannot be equivalent to Heisenberg's more physically motivated matrix mechanics unless its observables are quantized using this rule, and not the more symmetric prescription proposed by Weyl in 1926, which has become the standard procedure in quantum mechanics. This observation confirms the superiority of Born-Jordan quantization, as already suggested by Kauffmann. We also show how to explicitly determine the Born--Jordan quantization of arbitrary classical variables, and discuss the conceptual advantages in using this quantization scheme. We finally suggest that it might be possible to determine the correct quantization scheme by using the results of weak measurement experiments.
The aim of this short Note is to show that the Schrödinger and Heisenberg pictures of quantum mechanics are not equivalent unless one uses a quantization rule clearly stated by Born and Jordan in their famous 1925 paper. This rule is sufficient and necessary to ensure energy conservation in Heisenberg's matrix mechanics. It follows, in particular, that Schrödinger and Heisenberg mechanics are not equivalent if one quantizes observables using the Weyl prescription.
For an arbitrary pseudo-differential operator $A:\mathcal{S}(\mathbb{R}% ^{n})\longrightarrow\mathcal{S}^{\prime}(\mathbb{R}^{n})$ with Weyl symbol $a\in\mathcal{S}^{\prime}(\mathbb{R}^{2n})$, we consider the pseudo-differential operators $\widetilde{A}:\mathcal{S}(\mathbb{R}% ^{n+k})\longrightarrow\mathcal{S}^{\prime}(\mathbb{R}^{n+k})$ associated with the Weyl symbols $\widetilde{a}=(a\otimes1_{2k})\circ{s}$, where $1_{2k}(x)=1$ for all $x\in\mathbb{R}^{2k}$ and ${s}$ is a linear symplectomorphism of $\mathbb{R}^{2(n+k)}$. We call the operators $\widetilde{A}$ symplectic dimensional extensions of $A$. In this paper we study the relation between $A$ and $\widetilde{A}$ in detail, in particular their regularity, invertibility and spectral properties. We obtain an explicit formula allowing to express the eigenfunctions of $\widetilde{A}$ in terms of those of $A$. We use this formalism to construct new classes of pseudo-differential operators, which are extensions of the Shubin classes $HG_ρ^{m_{1},m_{0}}$ of globally hypoelliptic operators. We show that the operators in the new classes share the invertibility and spectral properties of the operators in $HG_{ρ}^{m_{1},m_{0}}$ but not the global hypoellipticity property. Finally, we study a few examples of operators that belong to the new classes and which are important in mathematical physics.