We investigate the nonperturbative quantization of phantom and ghost degrees of freedom by relating their representations in definite and indefinite inner product spaces. For a large class of potentials, we argue that the same physical information can be extracted from either representation. We provide a definition of the path integral for these theories, even in cases where the integrand may be exponentially unbounded, thereby removing some previous obstacles to their nonperturbative study. We apply our results to the study of ghost fields of Pauli–Villars and Lee–Wick type, and we show in the context of a toy model how to derive, from an exact nonperturbative path integral calculation, previously ad hoc prescriptions for Feynman diagram contour integrals in the presence of complex energies. We point out that the pole prescriptions obtained in ghost theories are opposite to what would have been expected if one had added conventional i∊ convergence factors in the path integral.
The author of @cite_12 describes a treatment of these states in the context of rigged Hilbert spaces. His construction should be very closely related to the one of the current article.
@cite_12
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In the present paper I show how it is possible to derive the Hilbert space formulation of Quantum Mechanics from a comprehensive definition of "physical experiment" and assuming "experimental accessibility and simplicity" as specified by five simple Postulates. This accomplishes the program presented in form of conjectures in the previous paper quant-ph 0506034. Pivotal roles are played by the "local observability principle", which reconciles the holism of nonlocality with the reductionism of local observation, and by the postulated existence of "informationally complete observables" and of a "symmetric faithful state". This last notion allows one to introduce an operational definition for the real version of the "adjoint"--i. e. the transposition--from which one can derive a real Hilbert-space structure via either the Mackey-Kakutani or the Gelfand-Naimark-Segal constructions. Here I analyze in detail only the Gelfand-Naimark-Segal construction, which leads to a real Hilbert space structure analogous to that of (classes of generally unbounded) selfadjoint operators in Quantum Mechanics. For finite dimensions, general dimensionality theorems that can be derived from a local observability principle, allow us to represent the elements of the real Hilbert space as operators over an underlying complex Hilbert space (see, however, a still open problem at the end of the paper). The route for the present operational axiomatization was suggested by novel ideas originated from Quantum Tomography. In this paper, we study the problem of sampling and reconstructing signals which are assumed to lie on or close to one of several subspaces of a Hilbert space. Importantly, we here consider a very general setting in which we allow infinitely many subspaces in infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces. This general approach allows us to unify many results derived recently in areas such as compressed sensing, affine rank minimization, analog compressed sensing and structured matrix decompositions. In this note we present the metric approximation property for weighted mixed-norm L-w((p1,...pn)) and variable exponent Lebesgue type spaces. As a consequence, this also implies the same property for modulation and Wiener-Amalgam spaces. We then characterise nuclear operators on such spaces and state the corresponding Grothendieck-Lidskii trace formulae. We apply the obtained results to derive criteria for nuclearity and trace formulae for periodic operators on R-n and functions of the harmonic oscillator in terms of global symbols. In §8.5 we have considered a geometric problem in the theory of stationary Gaussian processes and we have reduced this problem to the problem of the description of the bounded linear operators on Hilbert space that are unitarily equivalent to moduli of Hankel operators. In this chapter we are going to solve the latter problem, which in turn will lead to a solution of the above geometric problem in prediction theory.