Wave packets and the quadratic Monge–Kantorovich distance in quantum mechanics

Abstract

In this paper, we extend the upper and lower bounds for the “pseudo-distance” on quantum densities analogous to the quadratic Monge–Kantorovich(–Vasershtein) distance introduced in [F. Golse, C. Mouhot, T. Paul, Commun. Math. Phys. 343 (2016) 165–205] to positive quantizations defined in terms of the family of phase space translates of a density operator, not necessarily of rank 1 as in the case of the Töplitz quantization. As a corollary, we prove that the uniform as ħ→0 convergence rate for the mean-field limit of the N-particle Heisenberg equation holds for a much wider class of initial data than in [F. Golse, C. Mouhot, T. Paul, Commun. Math. Phys. 343 (2016) 165–205]. We also discuss the relevance of the pseudo-distance compared to the Schatten norms for the purpose of metrizing the set of quantum density operators in the semiclassical regime.