States of physical systems

Abstract

States of physical systems may be represented by states onB*-algebras, satisfying certain requirements of physical origin. We discuss such requirements as are associated with the presence of unbounded observables or invariance under a group. It is possible in certain cases to obtain a unique decomposition of states invariant under a group into extremal invariant states. Our main results is such a decomposition theorem when the group is the translation group inν dimensions and theB*-algebra satisfies a certain locality condition. An application of this theorem is made to representations of the canonical anticommutation relations.