Critical Review of Path Integral Formulation

TL;DR

This paper critically examines the path integral formulation in quantum mechanics and field theory, clarifying its limitations and differences from classical and field quantization, and distinguishing between Feynman's original approach and modern lattice methods.

Contribution

It clarifies the fundamental differences between Feynman's original path integral in QED and modern lattice field theory approaches, highlighting their distinct capabilities in quantization.

Findings

Feynman's path integral correctly performs second quantization.

Modern lattice path integrals do not correspond to field quantization.

The physical meaning of lattice path integrals remains unclear.

Abstract

The path integral formulation in quantum mechanics corresponds to the first quantization since it is just to rewrite the quantum mechanical amplitude into many dimensional integrations over discretized coordinates $x_n$. However, the path integral expression cannot be connected to the dynamics of classical mechanics, even though, superficially, there is some similarity between them. Further, the field theory path integral in terms of many dimensional integrations over fields does not correspond to the field quantization. We clarify the essential difference between Feynman's original formulation of path integral in QED and the modern version of the path integral method prevailing in lattice field theory calculations, and show that the former can make a correct second quantization while the latter cannot quantize fields at all and its physical meaning is unknown.