Deformations of the canonical commutation relations

Abstract

Deformations of the canonical commutation relations which have the effect of altering the spectrum of a standard Hamiltonian, bilinear in creation and annihilation operators are described. The problem of going over from an eigenvalue situation, as is the case in the vast majority of papers in the literature, to a theory with time evolution is discussed, and a special example with deformation parameter an Nth root of unity is constructed which possesses a consistent time evolution. This work is an account of some recent studies of associative deformations of the Heisenberg algebra of several creation and annihilation algebras, with Jean Nuyts of the University of Mons, Hainaut, together with some observations of my own concerning the difficulty of implementing time evolution in a quantum group context. It builds on earlier work with Cosmas Zachos (Argonne National Laboratory, USA), which in turn is re;ated to work of Manin, and Wess, Zumino and collaborators. The main idea is that, if quantum groups have any role in physics, then they must manifest themselves at the level of the basic rules of quantisation.