The Feynman effective classical potential in the Schr\"odinger formulation

Path integral Monte Carlo (PIMC) simulations have become an important tool for the investigation of the statistical mechanics of quantum systems. I discuss some of the history of applying the Monte Carlo method to non-relativistic quantum systems in path-integral representation. The principle feasibility of the method was well established by the early eighties, a number of algorithmic improvements have been introduced in the last two decades.

A generalization of the action principle of classical mechanics, motivated by the Closed Time Path (CTP) scheme of quantum field theory, is presented to deal with initial condition problems and dissipative forces. The similarities of the classical and the quantum cases are underlined. In particular, effective interactions which describe classical dissipative forces represent the system-environment entanglement. The relation between the traditional effective theories and their...

The path integral formalism gives a very illustrative and intuitive understanding of quantum mechanics but due to its difficult sum over phases one usually prefers Schr\"odinger's approach. We will show that it is possible to calculate simple quantum phenomena by performing Feynman's sum over all paths staying entirely in real time. Once the propagator is obtained it is particularly easy to get the energy spectrum or the evolution of any wavefunction.

In many situations, one can approximate the behavior of a quantum system, i.e. a wave function subject to a partial differential equation, by effective classical equations which are ordinary differential equations. A general method and geometrical picture is developed and shown to agree with effective action results, commonly derived through path integration, for perturbations around a harmonic oscillator ground state. The same methods are used to describe dynamical coherent ...

This work reflects on mechanics as an epistemological framework on the state of a physical system to regard dynamics as the distribution of mechanical properties over spacetime coordinates. The resulting distribution is taken to be the partition function of the relevant physical quantities over a space-time parametrized by coordinates. The partition yields a probabilistic interpretation that, based on Feynman's path integral formulation, leads to a dynamical law that generali...

In this paper, the classical Schr\"odinger equation, which allows the study of classical dynamics in terms of wave functions, is analyzed theoretically and numerically. First, departing from classical (Newtonian) mechanics, and assuming an additional single-valued condition for the Hamilton's principal function, the classical Schr\"odinger equation is obtained. This additional assumption implies inherent non-classical features on the description of the dynamics obtained from ...

A Feynman path integral formula for the Schr\"odinger equation with magnetic field is rigorously mathematically realized in terms of infinite dimensional oscillatory integrals. We show (by the example of a linear vector potential) that the requirement of the independence of the integral on the approximation procedure forces the introduction of a counterterm to be added to the classical action functional. This provides a natural explanation for the appearance of a Stratonovich...

I offer some historical comments about the origins of Feynman's path integral approach, as an alternative approach to standard quantum mechanics. Looking at the interaction between Einstein and Feynman, which was mediated by Feynman's thesis supervisor John Wheeler, it is argued that, contrary to what one might expect, the significance of the interaction between Einstein and Feynman pertained to a critique of classical field theory, rather than to a direct critique of quantum...

In this paper a new functional integral representation for classical dynamics is introduced. It is achieved by rewriting the Liouville picture in terms of bosonic creation-annihilation operators and utilizing the standard derivation of functional integrals for dynamical quantities in the coherent states representation. This results in a new class of functional integrals which are exactly solvable and can be found explicitly when the underlying classical systems are integrable...

Work belongs to the most basic notions in thermodynamics but it is not well understood in quantum systems, especially in open quantum systems. By introducing a novel concept of work functional along individual Feynman path, we invent a new approach to study thermodynamics in the quantum regime. Using the work functional, we derive a path-integral expression for the work statistics. By performing the $\hbar$ expansion, we analytically prove the quantum-classical correspondence...