Quantum Mechanics For Physicists

This accessible monograph introduces physicists to the general relation between classical and quantum mechanics based on the mathematical idea of deformation quantization and describes an original approach to the theory of quantum integrable systems developed by the author.The first goal of the book is to develop of a common, coordinate free formulation of classical and quantum Hamiltonian mechanics, framed in common mathematical language.In particular, a coordinate free model of quantum Hamiltonian systems in Riemannian spaces is formulated, based on the mathematical idea of deformation quantization, as a complete physical theory with an appropriate mathematical accuracy.

We are often told that quantum phenomena demand radical revisions of our scientific world view and that no physical theory describing well defined objects, such as particles described by their positions, evolving in a well defined way, let alone deterministically, can account for such phenomena. The great majority of physicists continue to subscribe to this view, despite the fact that just such a deterministic theory, accounting for all of the phe­ nomena of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, was proposed by David Bohm more than four decades ago and has arguably been around almost since the inception of quantum mechanics itself. Our purpose in asking colleagues to write the essays for this volume has not been to produce a Festschrift in honor of David Bohm (worthy an undertaking as that would have been) or to gather together a collection of papers simply stating uncritically Bohm's views on quantum mechanics. The central theme around which the essays in this volume are arranged is David Bohm's version of quantum mechanics. It has by now become fairly standard practice to refer to his theory as Bohmian mechanics and to the larger conceptual framework within which this is located as the causal quantum theory program.

Digging further into the conceptual foundations of Quantum Physics