From Weyl to Born–Jordan quantization: The Schrödinger representation revisited

Abstract

The ordering problem has been one of the long standing and much discussed questions in quantum mechanics from its very beginning. Nowadays, there is more or less a consensus among physicists that the right prescription is Weyl’s rule, which is closely related to the Moyal–Wigner phase space formalism. We propose in this report an alternative approach by replacing Weyl quantization with the less well-known Born–Jordan quantization. This choice is actually natural if we want the Heisenberg and Schrödinger pictures of quantum mechanics to be mathematically equivalent. It turns out that, in addition, Born–Jordan quantization can be recovered from Feynman’s path integral approach provided that one used short-time propagators arising from correct formulas for the short-time action, as observed by Makri and Miller. These observations lead to a slightly different quantum mechanics, exhibiting some unexpected features, and this without affecting the main existing theory; for instance quantizations of physical Hamiltonian functions are the same as in the Weyl correspondence. The differences are in fact of a more subtle nature; for instance, the quantum observables will not correspond in a one-to-one fashion to classical ones, and the dequantization of a Born–Jordan quantum operator is less straightforward than that of the corresponding Weyl operator. The use of Born–Jordan quantization moreover solves the “angular momentum dilemma”, which already puzzled L. Pauling. Born–Jordan quantization has been known for some time (but not fully exploited) by mathematicians working in time–frequency analysis and signal analysis, but ignored by physicists. One of the aims of this report is to collect and synthesize these sporadic discussions, while analyzing the conceptual differences with Weyl quantization, which is also reviewed in detail. Another striking feature is that the Born–Jordan formalism leads to a redefinition of phase space quantum mechanics, where the usual Wigner distribution has to be replaced with a new quasi-distribution reducing interference effects.