Wick quantization of cotangent bundles over Riemannian manifolds (Q556185)

A method of endowing every cotangent bundle of a Riemannian manifold \(Q\) with a formal Kähler structure is proposed. The formality means that the metric from \(Q\) is lifted to the phase space \(T^*Q\) in the form of a formal power series in the momenta with the coefficients being tensor fields on \(Q\). With this Kähler structure on \(T^*Q\) an explicitely Wick deformation quantization of a wide class of physical systems is performed. Three types of examples are given: spaces of constant curvature, harmonic oscillator and the free scalar field, nonlinear sigma-models. The last section is devoted to a discussion of the equivalence between Wick and Weyl quantization and problems of applying the proposed technique to field/string theory.