Toeplitz Quantization of a Free $ * $-Algebra
Stephen Bruce Sontz

TL;DR
This paper introduces a novel Toeplitz quantization method for free *-algebras, defining operators with non-commutative symbols and exploring creation and annihilation operators within this framework.
Contribution
It presents the first application of Toeplitz quantization to free *-algebras, expanding the theory to non-commutative algebraic structures.
Findings
Defined Toeplitz operators with non-commutative symbols.
Established properties of creation and annihilation operators.
Provided a new example of Toeplitz quantization in non-commutative setting.
Abstract
In this note we quantize the free -algebra generated by finitely many variables, which is a new example of the theory of Toeplitz quantization of -algebras as developed previously by the author. This is achieved by defining Toeplitz operators with symbols in that non-commutative free -algebra. These are densely defined operators acting in a Hilbert space. Then creation and annihilation operators are introduced as special cases of Toeplitz operators, and their properties are studied.
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Taxonomy
TopicsAdvanced Operator Algebra Research · Advanced Topics in Algebra · Advanced Algebra and Logic
Toeplitz Quantization of a
Free -Algebra
Stephen Bruce Sontz
Centro de Investigación en Matemáticas, A.C. (CIMAT), Jalisco S/N, Mineral de Valenciana, CP 36023, Guanajuato, Mexico
Abstract.
In this note we quantize the free -algebra generated by finitely many variables, which is a new example of the theory of Toeplitz quantization of -algebras as developed previously by the author. This is achieved by defining Toeplitz operators with symbols in that non-commutative free -algebra. These are densely defined operators acting in a Hilbert space. Then creation and annihilation operators are introduced as special cases of Toeplitz operators, and their properties are studied.
Dedication:
To Nikolai Vasilevski in celebration of his 70th birthday.
Keywords: Toeplitz operators, creation and annihilation operators
1. Introduction
The basic reference for this paper is [3] where a general theory of Toeplitz quantization of -algebras is defined and studied. More details including motivation and references can be found in [3].
2. The Free -algebra
The example in this paper is the free algebra on non-commuting variables . In particular, the variables do not commute for . The holomorphic sub-algebra is defined by , the free algebra on variables. The -operation (or conjugation) on is defined on the generators by
[TABLE]
where . This is then extended to finite products of these elements in the unique way that will make into a -algebra with . As explained in more detail in a moment these products form a vector space basis of , and so we extend the -operation to finite linear combinations of them to make it an anti-linear map over the field of complex numbers. Therefore, is not a sub--algebra. Rather, we have . Moreover, is a non-commutative sub-algebra of if . This set-up easily generalizes to infinitely many pairs of non-commuting variables .
The definition of is motivated as a non-commutative analogy to the commutative algebra of holomorphic polynomials in the Segal-Bargmann space , where is Lebesgue measure on the Euclidean space . (See [1] and [2].) This is one motivation behind using the notation for this sub-algebra.
We will later introduce a projection operator using a sesqui-linear form defined on . This is an essential ingredient in the following definition.
Definition 2.1**.**
Let be given. Then we define the Toeplitz operator with symbol as for all . It follows that is linear. We let . Then the linear map is called the Toeplitz quantization.
Multiplying the symbol on the left of gives a similar theory, which we will not expound on in further detail.
The sesqui-linear form on when restricted to will turn out to be an inner product. So will be a pre-Hilbert space that is dense in its completion, denoted as . This is another motivation for using the notation for this sub-algebra. So every Toeplitz operator will be a densely defined linear operator acting in the Hilbert space .
The definition of the sesqui-linear form on is a more involved story. To start it we let be the standard basis of consisting of all finite words (or monomials) in the finite alphabet , which has letters. The empty word (with zero letters) is the identity element . Let be a word in our alphabet. We let denote the length of , that is, the number of letters in . Therefore if and only if .
Definition 2.2**.**
Let with . Then we say that begins with a if the first letter of (as read from the left) is an element of ; otherwise, we say that begins with a .
If , then we say that begins with a and begins with a .
Remark: Suppose and that begins with a . Then has a unique representation as
[TABLE]
where , and begins with a . That is to say, the word begins with occurrences of ’s followed by occurrences of ’s and finally another word that begins with a . Note that if , then . We also have that . As a simple example of this representation, note that each basis element in with has this representation with and .
Dually, suppose that and that begins with a . Then has the obvious dual representation.
Now we are going to define a sesqui-linear form for by first defining it on pairs of elements of the basis and extending sesqui-linearly, which for us means anti-linear in the first entry and linear in the second. The definition on pairs will be by recursion on the length of the words. To start off the recursion for (that is, ) we define
[TABLE]
This choice is a convenient normalization convention.
The next case we consider is , begins with a and . In that case using (2.1) we define recursively
[TABLE]
where and is a positive weight. Here we also define the (variable length) multi-index and to be the reversed multi-index of the multi-index . It follows that in this case implies that we necessarily have and
[TABLE]
Moreover, by recursion must also has this same form as . Since the lengths are strictly decreasing (), this recursion terminates in a finite number of steps. Thus the previous equation can then be written using the obvious notations and as
[TABLE]
Symmetrically, for , and begins with a we write uniquely so that and begins with a and define recursively
[TABLE]
Next suppose that and and that both and begin with a and are written as above. In that case, we define
[TABLE]
where is the concatenation of the two multi-indices and . (Similarly for the notation .)
The definitions for two words that begin with a are dual to these definitions. We use the same weight factors for this dual part, though new real weight factors could have been used.
There is still one remaining case for which we have yet to define the sesqui-linear form. That case is when begins with a , begins with a , (or vice versa), and . In that case we define .
Theorem 2.1**.**
The sesqui-linear form on is complex symmetric, that is,
[TABLE]
Proof: The proof is by induction following the various cases of the recursive definition of the sesqui-linear form. First, for we have in which case
[TABLE]
Next we take the case , begins with a and . Then we write for multi-indices of lengths respectively and begins with a . So we calculate
[TABLE]
where we used the induction hypothesis and the reality of the weight for the last step. On the other hand, we have by definition that
[TABLE]
This proves that . Similarly, one shows , where and begins with a .
For the case where and and both and begin with a , we write and , where are multi-indices of lengths respectively and begin with a . Then we see by induction that
[TABLE]
The proofs for words that begin with are similar. The final case is if one of the pair begins with a and the other begins with a . But then as well as . So in this final case the identity is trivially true.
While the sesqui-linear form is complex symmetric according to this proposition, when it does not satisfy the nice properties with respect to the -operation as were given in [3]. We recall that those properties are
[TABLE]
where and . It seems reasonable to conjecture that these identities do hold for . This detail is left to the reader’s further consideration.
For the first property (2.3) the counterexample is provided by taking , and . Then we have on the one hand that
[TABLE]
On the other hand
[TABLE]
For the second property (2.4), we take and . Then we have for the left side that
[TABLE]
But for the right side we get
[TABLE]
Thus this example is not compatible with all of the general theory presented in [3] when . But it still is an illuminating example as we shall discuss in more detail a bit later on. However, we do have a particular case of (2.3) in this example. The only change from (2.3) in the following is that now is required instead of .
Theorem 2.2**.**
Suppose that and . Then
[TABLE]
Proof: We first prove the result for . It suffices to consider , and for multi-indices . Then we get
[TABLE]
Next the other side evaluates to
[TABLE]
using . And so the identity holds in this case.
Next suppose that . Then we apply the result of the first case to the element . And that will prove this second case as the reader can check by using Theorem 2.1.
Continuing our comments about why this is an illuminating example, let us note that it satisfies the first seven of the eight properties used for the more general theory presented in [3]. While it does not satisfy in general the eighth property (that and are adjoints on the domain for all ), it satisfies the weaker version of this property given in Theorem 2.5 below.
According to the general theory we have to find a set which must be a Hamel basis of as well as being an orthonormal set. Clearly, the candidate is
[TABLE]
the words in the sub-alphabet . And this almost works. We need only to normalize these words. Taking and in (2.2) (so we have , and ) we get
[TABLE]
where and are multi-indices of lengths respectively. In particular, if . On the other hand, . So we define , and the orthonormal Hamel basis is defined by
[TABLE]
This argument shows that the complex symmetric sesqui-linear form restricted to is positive definite, that is, it is an inner product. We let denote the completion of with respect to this inner product. Then is an orthonormal basis of . However, it is sometimes more convenient to work with the orthogonal (but perhaps not orthonormal) set of .
We now have enough information about the sesqui-linear form in order to define the projection .
Definition 2.3**.**
Let be given. Then define
[TABLE]
This will be well defined when we show in a moment that the sum on the right side of (2.5) is finite. If this were a Hilbert space setting, we could write in Dirac notation, and would be the orthogonal projection onto the closed subspace . Anyway, this abuse of notation motivates the definition of . Given that is well-defined, it is clear that is linear, that it acts as the identity on (since is an orthonormal basis of ) and that its range is .
Theorem 2.3**.**
The sum on the right side of (2.5) has only finitely many non-zero terms. Consequently, is well-defined.
Proof: Take . It suffices to show that except for finitely many multi-indices , since is proportional to . So it suffices to calculate for all possible multi-indices . We do this by cases.
If begins with a , then for all multi-indices , the empty multi-index. (Note that .) It follows that all of the terms, except possibly one term, on the right side of (2.5) are [math] and so in this case. For the particular case (i.e., ) we have that , using .
So the only remaining the case is when begins with a and . Then, using for multi-indices of lengths and respectively and begins with a , we have
[TABLE]
Whether this is non-zero now is the question. More explicitly, for a given of this form how many ’s are there such that this expression could be non-zero? However, if the factor is non-zero, then we have necessarily that the multi-index of variable length forms the initial entries in the given multi-index of length . Thus for a given there are at most finitely many for which (2.6) could be non-zero. So the sum on the right side of (2.5) has only finitely many non-zero terms, and is well-defined.
Theorem 2.4**.**
* is symmetric with respect to the sesqui-linear form, that is, for all .*
Proof: Using Theorem 2.1 to justify the third equality, we calculate
[TABLE]
We also used the finite additivity of the sesqui-linear form in each entry, since the sums have only finitely many non-zero terms.
This result says that has an adjoint on , namely itself. Since the sesqui-linear form may be degenerate, adjoints need not be unique.
Theorem 2.5**.**
Suppose that . Then for all we have
Proof: Using the previous result and Theorem 2.2 we calculate
[TABLE]
Since the sesqui-linear form is an inner product when restricted to , is the unique adjoint of on . Symmetrically, is the unique adjoint of on .
Next, for all we define the creation and annihilation operators associated to the variables , for by
[TABLE]
respectively. These are operators densely defined in sending to itself. By Theorem 2.5 the operators and are adjoints of each other on the domain .
We now evaluate these operators on the basis elements of , where is a multi-index. First, for the creation operator we have
[TABLE]
Here and also denotes the multi-index with exactly one entry, namely the integer . Also we are using the notation for the multi-index with the integer concatenated to the right of the multi-index . It follows that the kernel of is zero as the reader can check. Also, the weight of the ‘higher’ state appears in the numerator while the weight of the ‘lower’ state is in the denominator. This turns out to be consistent with the way the weights (which are products of factorials) work in the case of standard quantum mechanics.
Next, for the annihilation operator for we have to evaluate for every multi-index . To do this, consider
[TABLE]
where the multi-indices and have lengths and respectively. We also used , since is a multi-index with exactly one entry in it. The only possible non-zero value occurs when the concatenated multi-index is equal to the multi-index . So for we have that If the last entry in the multi-index is not (i.e., ), then for all multi-indices . Consequently, in this case we calculate
[TABLE]
Therefore, in this example the annihilation operator has infinite dimensional kernel. As a very particular case, we take , the empty multi-index, and get that for all , that is, . So is a normalized vacuum state in .
On the other hand if for some clearly unique multi-index (and in particular ), then we find that
[TABLE]
and consequently in this case
[TABLE]
Again, the weight of the ‘higher’ state appears in the numerator while the weight of the ‘lower’ state is in the denominator. And again this is consistent with standard quantum mechanics.
It is now an extended exercise to compute the commutation relations of these operators. For example, if , since . The formulas for these relations are simpler if we take the weights to be for positive real numbers .
3. Concluding Remarks
I conclude with possibilities for future related research concerning algorithms that manipulate the words in the basis of the algebra .
The sesqui-linear form on serves mainly to define the projection operator , which is crucial in this quantization theory. Using this, creation operators tack on a holomorphic variable on the right (up to a weight factor), while annihilation operator chop off the appropriate holomorphic variable on the right, if present (again up to a weight), and otherwise map the word to zero. One can define other projection operators that see more deeply into the word, rather than looking at only the rightmost part of the word. In general each occurrence of is erased while at the same time some corresponding occurrence of is also erased. The end result is a word with no ’s at all. Moreover, if the original word had no ’s to begin with, then it will remain unchanged. Basically, the projection map is an algorithm that scans a word from one end to the other, eliminating all ’s and some ’s.
There are many such algorithms. To give the reader an idea of this, let us consider scanning a word from left to right until we hit the first occurrence of for some . We change the word by eliminating this and the rightmost occurrence of to the left of this , if there is such an occurrence. If there is no occurrence of to the left, we define on this word to be zero. Otherwise, we continue scanning from our current position in the word looking for the next for some . We repeat the same procedure. Since the word is finite in length, this algorithm will terminate. At such time there will be no occurrences of ’s left. The resulting word (or zero) will be evaluated on the original word.
The reader is invited to produce other algorithms for finding one (or various) occurrences of to pair with an identified occurrence of . There are other deterministic algorithms for sure, but there are even stochastic algorithms as well. These stochastic algorithms could pair a random number of occurrences of , including zero occurrences with non-zero probability, with a given occurrence of . Also, the locations of these occurrences could be random. Then all Toeplitz operators, including those of creation and annihilation, would become random operators.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I thank the organizers for the opportunity to participate in the event Operator Algebras, Toeplitz Operators and Related Topics, (OATORT) held in Boca del Rio, Veracruz, Mexico in November, 2018.
The reference list from the paper itself. Each links out to its DOI / PubMed record.
- 1[1] V. Bargmann, On a Hilbert space of analytic functions and its associated integral transform. I , Commun. Pure Appl. Math. 14 (1961) 187–214.
- 2[2] B.C. Hall, Holomorphic methods in analysis and mathematical physics , in: “First Summer School in Analysis and Mathematical Physics” (S. Pérez-Esteva and C. Villegas-Blas, Eds.), 1–59, Contemp. Math., 260 , Am. Math. Soc., 2000.
- 3[3] S.B. Sontz, Toeplitz Quantization without Measure or Inner Product , Proceedings of: Geometric Methods in Physics. XXXII Workshop 2013. Trends in Mathematics, (2014) 57–66. ar Xiv:1312.0588
