The discovery of quantum mechanics in the years 1925-1930 necessitated the consideration of associating ordinary functions with non-commuting operators. Methods were proposed by Born/Jordan, Kirkwood, and Weyl. Sometime later, Moyal saw the connection between the Weyl rule and the Wigner distribution, which had been proposed by Wigner in 1932 as a way of doing quantum statistical mechanics. The basic idea of associating functions with operators has since been generalized and developed to a high degree. It has found several application fields, including quantum mechanics, pseudo-differential operators, time-frequency analysis, quantum optics, wave propagation, differential equations, image processing, radar, and sonar.
This book aims at bringing together the results from the above mentioned fields in a unified manner and showing the reader how the methods have been applied. A wide audience is addressed, particularly students and researchers who want to obtain an up-to-date working knowledge of the field. The mathematics is accessible to the uninitiated reader and is presented in a straightforward manner.
This book deals with the theory and application of associating a function of two variables with a function of two operators that do not commute.
The concept of associating ordinary functions with operators has arisen in many areas of science and mathematics, and up to the beginning of the twentieth century many isolated results were obtained. These developments were mostly based on associating a function of one variable with one operator, the operator generally being the differentiation operator. With the discovery of quantum mechanics in the years 1925-1930, there arose, in a natural way, the issue that one has to associate a function of two variables with a function of two operators that do not commute. Methods to do so became known as rules of association, correspondence rules, or ordering rules. This has led to a wonderfully rich mathematical development that has found applications in many fields. Subsequently it was realized that for every correspondence rule there is a corresponding phase-space distribution. Now the fields of correspondence rules and phase-space distributions are intimately connected. A similar development occurred in the field of time-frequency analysis where the aim is to understand signals with changing frequencies.
The Weyl Operator and Its Generalization aims at bringing together the basic results of the field in a unified manner. A wide audience is addressed, particularly students and researchers who want to obtain an up-to-date working knowledge of the field. The mathematics is accessible to the uninitiated reader and is presented in a straightforward manner.
