A peculiarity of the creation operator

DOI10.1017/S0017089502010091MaRDI QIDQ4531394zbMATH OpenFDO

Authors Jan Stochel, Franciszek Hugon Szafraniec

Publication date 5 August 2002

Published in Glasgow Mathematical Journal (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017089502010091

creation operator Heisenberg couple Schrödinger couple translation invariance unitary equivalence weighted shift

Hermitian and normal operators (spectral measures, functional calculus, etc.) (47B15) Subnormal operators, hyponormal operators, etc. (47B20) Linear operators on special spaces (weighted shifts, operators on sequence spaces, etc.) (47B37) Commutators, derivations, elementary operators, etc. (47B47) (C)-semigroups, regularized semigroups (47D60) Applications of operator theory in the physical sciences (47N50) Commutation relations and statistics as related to quantum mechanics (general) (81S05)

Review text

The paper under review is devoted to a further analysis of the closable densely defined creation operator \(a^{+} : = \frac{1}{\sqrt{2}}(M-D)\) on a (complex) separable Hilbert space \(H\), where \(M\) denotes the multiplication operator and \(D=\frac{d}{dx}\) the standard differential operator. Creation operators play a fundamental role in quantum mechanics and in high energy particle physics, where \(H\) is given by the Fock space. To that purpose, the authors introduce the class of abstract creation operators, defined as closed weighted shifts with weights \(\sqrt{n+1}\), \(n \in \mathbb N_0\). In general, one starts with a chosen orthonormal basis (such as the Hermite basis in \(L^2(\mathbb R)\)) so that the operator under consideration becomes a weighted shift (such as \(a^{+}\) with respect to the Hermite basis). Regarding the dependence on the choice of the orthonormal basis, the authors show that two arbitary abstract creation operators on the same Hilbert space already are unitarily equivalent, implying that for any creation operator \(S\) and any \(\lambda \in \mathbb C\), the translation \(S - \lambda I\) still is a creation operator which is unitarily equivalent to \(S\). Though this unitary equivalence holds for other classes of operators as well, the authors prove in their main result, that within the class of arbitrary weighted shifts (regardless of the weight sequence and the selected orthonormal basis) the only operator \(S\) all of whose translations \(S - \lambda I\) are weighted shifts as well (or which at least has a translation different from \(S\) and a weighted shift as well) is the abstract creation operator \(\alpha S\), where \(\alpha \in \mathbb C^{\ast}\). Concrete applications of these results are given in the description of certain operators on the Segal-Bargmann space and the following characterization of Heisenberg couples by translation invariance properties. If \({\mathbf\sigma} = (\sigma_n)_{n=0}^{\infty}\) is a sequence of positive real numbers with \(\sigma_0 = \frac{1}{\sqrt{2}}\) and \((h_n)_{n=0}^{\infty}\) denotes the Hermite basis in \(L^2(\mathbb R)\), it even follows that the creation operator \(a^{+} = \frac{1}{\sqrt{2}}(M-D)\) already is completely determined by all those pairs of closed symmetric operators \((Q, P) \in \mathfrak I((h_n)_{n=0}^{\infty}, {\mathbf\sigma})\) which satisfy the translation invariance propety \((Q + \xi I, P + \eta I) \in \mathfrak I\) for all \((\xi, \eta) \in \mathbb R^2\setminus\{(0,0)\}\) as well. Then \(\frac{1}{\sqrt{2}}(Q +iP)\) is an abstract creation operator, implying that \(Q=M\) and \(P=i D\).

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