Convergence of star products: from examples to a general framework (Q2187950)

This paper gives a thorough survey on some important aspects of deformation quantization, recalling the fundamental achievements of formal deformation quantization to argue that one of the most important remaining problems is the question of convergence, which is far from being settled. For this convergence problem, it discusses different approaches found in the literature so far, emphasizing three basic examples: the Weyl star product for constant Poisson structures, the Gutt star product for linear Poisson structures, and the Wick-type star product on the Poincaré disc. Besides a concise exposition on successful approaches for these three examples, this paper is concluded with some open questions and hints on a further development for the theory of convergence of star products, a few of which are quoted from the text as follows. 1. The three classes of examples indicate that the proposed way to convergence is at least not completely hopeless. Of course, the examples are the most simple ones but already here we see a rich and nontrivial analytic structure when discussing convergence. Thus it is reasonable to stick with the proposal and investigate further examples. 3. The formal power series approach is perhaps the only possibility to include infinite-dimensional phase spaces. The applications to (quantum) field theory are by far not yet explored. Here already the constant Poisson structures provide interesting scenarios. 7. Finally, in the theory of locally convex algebras, much effort is spend on the cases of locally multiplicatively convex algebras. Here one can use Banach algebra techniques and obtains a closely related extension compared to the Banach algebra case. However, all the examples above indicate that there is a non-trivial and interesting world of locally convex algebras far beyond the locally multiplicatively convex case. Here one needs to develop new techniques also from a more conceptual point of view. The examples above can then be seen as a guideline to formulate such an extension: they should provide ideal testing grounds as they show already a fairly complicated nature but are still manageable and concrete enough to test general ideas.