Path integrals from spacetime quantum actions

Abstract

The possibility of extending the canonical formulation of quantum mechanics (QM) to a space–time symmetric form has recently attracted wide interest. In this context, a recent proposal has shown that a spacetime symmetric many-body extension of the Page and Wootters mechanism naturally leads to the so-called Quantum Action (QA) operator, a quantum version of the action of classical mechanics. In this work, we focus on connecting the QA with the well-established Feynman’s Path Integral (PI). In particular, we present a novel formalism which allows one to identify the “sum over histories” with a quantum trace, where the role of the classical action is replaced by the corresponding QA. The trace is defined in the extended Hilbert space resulting from assigning a conventional Hilbert space to each time slice and then taking their tensor product. The formalism opens the way to the application of quantum computation protocols to the evaluation of PIs and general correlation functions, and reveals that different representations of the PI arise from distinct choices of basis in the evaluation of the same trace expression. The Hilbert space embedding of the PIs also discloses a new approach to their continuum time limit. Finally, we discuss how the ensuing canonical-like version of QM inherits many properties from the PI formulation, thus allowing an explicitly covariant treatment of spacetime symmetries.