Symmetry in finite phase plane

Abstract

The known symmetries in one-dimensional systems are inversion and translations. These symmetries persist in finite phase plane, but a novel symmetry arises in view of the discrete nature of the coordinate xi and the momentum pi : xi and pi can undergo permutations. Thus, if xi assumes M discrete values, i = 0, 1,2,..., M – 1, a permutation will change the order of the set x0,x1,..., xM−1 into a new ordered set. Such a symmetry element does not exist for a continuous x-coordinate in an infinite phase plane. Thus, in a finite phase plane, translations can be replaced by permutations. This is also true for the inversion operator. The new permutation symmetry has been used for the construction of conjugate representations and for the splitting of the M-dimensional vector space into independent subspaces. This splitting is exhaustive in the sense that if M = iMi with Mi being prime numbers, the M-dimensional space splits into M1,M2,...Mn-dimensional independent subspaces. It is shown that following this splitting one can design new potentials with appropriate constants of motion. A related problem is the Weyl-Heisenberg group in the M-dimensional space which turns into a direct product of its subgroups in the Mi-dimensional subspaces. As an example we consider the case of M = 8.