Feynman formulas for particles with position-dependent mass

Abstract

In this paper, we obtain Feynman formulas for solutions to equations describing the diffusion of particles with mass depending on the particle position and to Schrodinger-type equations describing the evolution of quantum particles with similar properties. Such particles (to be more precise, quasi-particles) arise in, e.g., models of semiconductors. Tens of papers studying such models have been published (see [1] and the references therein), but representations of solutions to the arising Schrodinger- and heat-type equations, which go back to Feynman, have not been considered so far. One of the possible reasons is that the traditional application of Feynman’s approach involves integrals with respect to diffusion processes whose transition probabilities have no explicit representation (in terms of elementary functions) in the situation under consideration. In this paper, instead of these transition probabilities, we use their approximations, which can be expressed in terms of elementary functions. Apparently, similar approximations were first applied in [4, 5] to study the diffusion and the quantum evolution of particles of constant mass on Riemannian manifolds. It turns out that the central idea of the approach developed in [4, 5] can also be applied (after appropriate modifications) to the situation considered in this paper. In what follows, we assume that solutions to the Cauchy problems for the equations under examination exist and are unique; thus, we can and shall consider not only solutions to equations but also the corresponding semigroups. Somewhat changing the terminology of [2, 6], we define a real (complex) Schrodinger semigroup as e – tH (respectively, e ith ), where H is a self-adjoint positive operator on a Hilbert space or the generator of a diffusion process.