States, observables and symmetries in p-adic quantum mechanics

Abstract

In the framework of quantum mechanics constructed over a quadratic extension of the field of p-adic numbers, we consider an algebraic definition of physical states. Next, the corresponding observables, whose definition completes the statistical interpretation of the theory, are introduced as SOVMs, a p-adic counterpart of the POVMs associated with a quantum system over the complex numbers. Differently from the standard complex setting, the space of all states of a p-adic quantum system has an affine — rather than convex — structure. Thus, a symmetry transformation may be defined, in a natural way, as a map preserving this affine structure. We argue that the group of all symmetry transformations of a p-adic quantum system has a richer structure wrt the case of standard quantum mechanics over the complex numbers.