Interpretative aspects of quantum mechanics. Matteo Campanella's mathematical studies (Q2181289)

Matteo Campanella was a professor on Telecommunications at the University of Palermo, but had very wide interests. When he died in 2016 he left behind many notes on the foundation of quantum mechanics. The book is a selection from these notes made by his wife Maria Stella Mongiovì and his student David Jou. The book is written from a very broad and deep mathematical point of view, and it is not quite easy to follow all the arguments. More than half of the book (74 of the 143 pages) consists of Appendices on various mathematical topics ( category theory, barycentric coordinates, linear spaces, Hilbert-Schmidt spaces etc.) The main purpose of all these arguments is to make precise a derivation of the Born rule following Zurek's environment-related derivation. The starting point is a composed state determined from an environment E and a physical system S, described by Hilbert spaces K and H, respectively. In Chap. 2 it is first shown, using the envariance property introduced by Zurek, that the state of S associated with a pure state of the composite system may be defined as the orbit of this pure state under a certain group, a tensor product of the identity acting on H and the group of unitary transformations acting on K. From this, the author arrives at a characterization of a state of S as a density operator arising as an orbit invariant without any a priori probabilistic interpretation. In Chap. 3, the step from the above non-probabilistic definition of a state of S to a probabilistic definition is given. Two different items are discussed. The first consists in the different ways of representing the state depending on whether it is considered as isolated or not. The second concerns the different ways of describing the evolution in the absence of or in the present of interaction. Finally, in Chap. 4 it is shown that one is forced to give to a density operator whose non-null eigenspaces are all one-dimensional a probabilistic interpretation, specifically, the probability of each state is shown to be equal to the eigenvalue of the density operator. This gives the Born rule in this setting. In the bibliography of the book there are given references to several derivations of the Born rule from the points of view of various interpretations of quantum mechanics. This list is extensive, but not quite complete.