{"id":12403,"date":"2021-07-12T18:09:55","date_gmt":"2021-07-12T22:09:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=12403"},"modified":"2021-07-12T18:09:55","modified_gmt":"2021-07-12T22:09:55","slug":"the-problem-of-quantization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=12403","title":{"rendered":"The Problem of Quantization"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been watching Witten’s ongoing talks about geometric Langlands mentioned here<\/a>, and wanted to recommend to everyone, mathematician or physicist, the first of them, on The Problem of Quantization (pdf here<\/a>, video here<\/a>, the question session is very worthwhile). For those very sensibly not interested in the intricacies of geometric Langlands, this talk is about the fundamental issue of “quantization”.<\/p>\n

Hamiltonian mechanics gives a beautiful geometrical formulation of classical mechanics in terms of the Poisson bracket on functions, while quantum mechanics involves operators with non-trivial commutators. It was Dirac’s great insight that “quantization” takes functions to operators, taking the Poisson bracket to the commutator. In mathematician’s language, it’s supposed to be a unitary representation of the Lie algebra of the infinite dimensional group of canonical transformations of a symplectic manifold, so a homomorphism from functions with Poisson bracket to the Lie algebra of skew-adjoint operators on a complex vector space.<\/p>\n

The problem with this is that you’d like to have an irreducible representation, but the only way to get this is to pick some extra structure on the symplectic manifold. The standard example is the phase space $\\mathbf R^{2n}$, where you have to pick a decomposition into position and momentum coordinates. The state space will then be functions of just position, or just momentum. A different choice is to complexify, and look at functions of either holomorphic or anti-holomorphic coordinates. This choice is called a “polarization”. One aspect of the “problem” of quantization is that, given a phase space (symplectic manifold), there may not be an appropriate polarization. Or, there may be many different ones, with no obvious reason why they should give the same quantum theory.<\/p>\n

Witten doesn’t mention one aspect of this that I find most fascinating. For relativistic quantum field theories the phase space is a space of solutions of a relativistic wave-equation. To get physically sensible results one must choose a polarization that distinguishes between positive and negative energy (or between functions which extend holomorphically in the positive or negative imaginary time direction).<\/p>\n

In these lectures, Witten advertises a rather exotic quantization contruction, using (even for a finite dimensional symplectic manifold ) conformally invariant boundary conditions in a two-dimensional QFT. I’m not convinced that this is really a good way to deal with the case where what you’re doing is looking for representations of a finite-dimensional Lie algebra, but it’s plausible this is the right way to think about the geometric Langlands situation, where you’re trying to quantize a moduli space of Higgs bundles.<\/p>\n

In the question section, someone asked about my favorite approach to this problem, essentially using fermionic variables and cohomology. This can be thought of in general as using spinors and the Dirac operator, with the Dolbeault operator a special case when the symplectic manifold is K\u00e4hler. Witten responded that he had only really looked at this in the K\u00e4hler special case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been watching Witten’s ongoing talks about geometric Langlands mentioned here, and wanted to recommend to everyone, mathematician or physicist, the first of them, on The Problem of Quantization (pdf here, video here, the question session is very worthwhile). For … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,24,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quantum-mechanics","category-quantum-theory-the-book","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12403"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12403\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12411,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12403\/revisions\/12411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}