These days, the term Noncommutative Dynamics has several interpretations. It is used in this book to refer to a set of phenomena associated with the dynamical evo lution of quantum systems of the simplest kind that involve rigorous mathematical structures associated with infinitely many degrees of freedom. The dynamics of such a system is represented by a one-parameter group of automorphisms of a non commutative algebra of observables, and we focus primarily on the most concrete case in which that algebra consists of all bounded operators on a Hilbert space. If one introduces a natural causal structure into such a dynamical system, then a pair of one-parameter semigroups of endomorphisms emerges, and it is useful to think of this pair as representing the past and future with respect to the given causality. These are both Eo-semigroups, and to a great extent the problem of understanding such causal dynamical systems reduces to the problem of under standing Eo-semigroups. The nature of these connections is discussed at length in Chapter 1. The rest of the book elaborates on what the author sees as the impor tant aspects of what has been learned about Eo-semigroups during the past fifteen years. Parts of the subject have evolved into a satisfactory theory with effective toolsj other parts remain quite mysterious. Like von Neumann algebras, Eo-semigroups divide naturally into three types: 1,11,111.
The term Noncommutative Dynamics can be interpreted in several ways. It is used in this book to refer to a set of phenomena associated with the dynamics of quantum systems of the simplest kind that involve rigorous mathematical structures associated with infinitely many degrees of freedom. The dynamics of such a system is represented by a one-parameter group of automorphisms of a noncommutative algebra of observables, and the author focuses primarily on the most concrete case in which that algebra consists of all bounded operators on a Hilbert space.
This subject overlaps with several mathematical areas of current interest, including quantum field theory, the dynamics of open quantum systems, noncommutative geometry, and both classical and noncommutative probability theory. This is the first book to give a systematic presentation of progress during the past fifteen years on the classification of E-semigroups up to cocycle conjugacy. There are many new results that cannot be found in the existing literature, as well as significant reformulations and simplifications of the theory as it exists today.
William Arveson is Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. He has published two previous books with Springer-Verlag, An Invitation to C*-algebras (1976) and A Short Course on Spectral Theory (2001).
