Feynman's Operational Calculus and Beyond: Noncommutativity and Time-Ordering

by Gerald W. Johnson, Michel L. Lapidus, Lance Nielsen

This book is aimed at providing a coherent, essentially self-contained, rigorous and comprehensive abstract theory of Feynmans operational calculus for noncommuting operators. Although it is inspired by Feynmans original heuristic suggestions and time-ordering rules in his seminal 1951 paper An operator calculus having applications in quantum electrodynamics, as will be made abundantly clear in the introduction (Chapter 1) and elsewhere in the text, the theorydeveloped in this book also goes well beyond them in a number of directions which were not anticipated in Feynmans work. Hence, the second part of the main title of this book.The basic properties of the operational calculus are developed and certain algebraic and analytic properties of the operational calculus are explored. Also, the operational calculus will be seen to possess some pleasant stability properties. Furthermore, an evolution equation and a generalized integral equation obeyed by the operational calculus are discussed and connections with certain analytic Feynman integrals are noted. This volume is essentially self-contained and we only assume that the reader has a reasonable, graduate level, background in analysis, measure theory and functional analysis or operator theory. Much of the necessary remaining background is supplied in the text itself.

617 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 6, 2015

About the author

Gerald. W. Johnson is a professor emeritus of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Librarian note: For the historian Gerald White Johnson, see this record.