Mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics. Revised with the assistance of M. Krishna (Q5919260)

The idea that irreducible representations of the inhomogeneous Lorentz group classify elementary quantum systems goes back to \textit{E. P. Wigner} [Ann. Math. (2) 40, 149--204 (1939; Zbl 0020.29601)]. He himself, coworkers, and others brought forward this idea which was worked out, also taking into consideration the Galilean group, as a fundament of quantum physics during the second half of the last century. Unfortunately, complete and mathematically rigorous descriptions of this central part of the foundations of quantum mechanics in terms of modern mathematics are rather rare. So the present book fills a gap. Clearly, the book presupposes some knowledge in modern mathematics, but the main steps leading to the main conclusions are carefully formulated and rigorously proved. There are exercises distributed in the text and sometimes the reader is guided to prove special results by them. In the first chapter the Hilbert space formulation of quantum mechanics is given. It begins with the exact statement of the assumptions and proof of Gleason's theorem which is illustrated by the Bloch ball. Comparing the classical measure induced on the value space of a random variable on a measure space (\texttt{Bildmaß}) with the quantum mechanical projection valued measure defining an observable the notions of expectation value, variance, uncertainty are explained and the uncertainty relations are derived. The next topic is the Wigner(-Bargmann) theorem. The explanation given at the beginning of this section (1.3), however, is misleading: ``Observer \(O_1\) measures \dots Then `\(O_2\) measures\dots' suggests that successive measurements are meant which is by no means true. An unambiguous explanation is given w.r.t. imprimitivity systems later on. The next step consists in the introduction of ray- or projective representations of compact metric groups. The physical meaning of the generators of the Euclidean group is explained. In the last section of chapter one it is shown how to compose spectral measures forming direct sums of Hilbert spaces. The concepts of unitary equivalence and spectral representations is introduced. The theorem of Hahn-Hellinger about the representation of a given spectral measure as a direct sum of canonical spectral measures is proved. Chapter two begins with the definition of imprimitivity systems w.r. t. a metric group acting on a standard Borel space. As an example, the Euclidean group in three dimensions is considered. Unitarily equivalent imprimitivity systems, canonical imprimitivity systems are introduced and Mackey's imprimitivity theorem for transitive group actions is proved and explained. The existence of projective unitary antiunitary representations and their construction by methods of induced representations are considered in detail. The third chapter contains propositions on multipliers for locally compact groups, direct and semidirect products of them, semisimple Lie groups and, what is especially important for the purpose of this book, semidirect products of vector spaces with linear Lie groups. A section on the multipliers of the Galilean group and another one on the multipliers of the Poincaré group conclude the chapter. In the fourth chapter the quantum mechanical descriptions of elementary particles in the sense of Wigner, determined by their reducibles representations of either the Galilean or the Poincaré group, as well as systems composed of different components are derived. First, the projective unitary antiunitary representations of semidirect products in case of abelian normal component are considered in general. Then the irreducible unitary representations of the covering group of the Galilean group, parameterized by mass and spin, and their generators are constructed. It is followed by a consideration of \(N\)-particle systems. A similar description is given for relativistic particles which is restricted to the connected component of the Poincaré group. Here the consideration of composite systems is restricted to one- and two-electron atoms. This book can be very well recommended to students and lecturers on mathematical backgrounds of quantum mechanics.