The Representation Theory of Decoherence Functionals in History Quantum Theories

Abstract

In the first part of this paper the general perspective of history quantum theoriesis reviewed. History quantum theories provide a conceptual and mathematicalframework for formulating quantum theories without a globally definedHamiltonian time evolution and for introducing the concept of space-time eventinto quantum theory. On a mathematical level a history quantum theory ischaracterized by the space of histories, which represent the space-time events, andby the space of decoherence functionals, which represent the quantum mechanicalstates in the history approach. The second part of this paper is devoted to thestudy of the structure of the space of decoherence functionals for some physicallyreasonable spaces of histories in some detail. The temporal reformulation ofstandard Hamiltonian quantum theories suggests to consider the case that thespace of histories is given by (i) the lattice of projection operators on someHilbert space or, slightly more generally, (ii) the set of projection operators insome von Neumann algebra. In the case (i) the conditions are identified underwhich decoherence functionals can be represented by, respectively, trace classoperators, bounded operators, or families of trace class operators on the tensorproduct of the underlying Hilbert space by itself. Moreover, we discuss thenaturally arising representations of decoherence functionals as sesquilinear forms.The paper ends with a discussion of the consequences of the results for thegeneral axiomatic framework of history theories.