A Golden-Thompson inequality in supersymmetric quantum mechanics (Q756826)

The Golden-Thompson inequality stating that the quantum partition function does not exceed its classical counterpart is generalized to the supersymmetric case. More specifically, one considers the following quantum-mechanical system (SUSY QM). The Hilbert space of states is \({\mathcal H}=L^ 2({\mathbb{R}}^ n)\otimes \Lambda ({\mathbb{C}}^ n)\) where \(\Lambda ({\mathbb{C}}^ n)\) is the Grassmann algebra over \({\mathbb{C}}^ n\). The fermionic creation and annihilation operators are defined in standard way, \(\{b^+_ i,b_ j\}=\delta_{ij}\). The hamiltonian reads \[ H=- \Delta +\sum_{j,k}\nabla^ 2_{jk}V(x)[b^+_ j,b_ k]+\sum_{j}| \nabla_ jV(x)|^ 2 \] where V: \({\mathbb{R}}^ n\to {\mathbb{R}}\) is a polynomial of degree \(\geq 2\) (in fact, H is the Friedrichs extension of the above expression defined on \(C_ 0^{\infty}({\mathbb{R}}^ n)\otimes \Lambda ({\mathbb{C}}^ n)).\) With the above definitions the following theorem is proven. Assume that \[ \int \det (I+\exp \{-t\nabla^ 2V(x)\})\exp \{-t| \nabla V(x)|^ 2-\Delta V\}d^ nx<\infty \] for some \(t>0\). Then, exp(-tH) is trace class, and \[ tr(e^{-tH})\leq (2\pi t)^{-n/2}\int \det (I+e^{-t\nabla^ 2V(x)})e^{-1/2t(| \nabla V(x)|^ 2-\Delta V)}d^ nx. \]