Hilbert space representations of decoherence functionals and quantum measures

Abstract

Abstract We show that any decoherence functional D can be represented by a spanning vector-valued measure on a complex Hilbert space. Moreover, this representation is unique up to an isomorphism when the system is finite. We consider the natural map U from the history Hilbert space K to the standard Hilbert space H of the usual quantum formulation. We show that U is an isomorphism from K onto a closed subspace of H and that U is an isomorphism from K onto H if and only if the representation is spanning. We then apply this work to show that a quantum measure has a Hilbert space representation if and only if it is strongly positive. We also discuss classical decoherence functionals, operator-valued measures and quantum operator measures.