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Open AccessJournal ArticleDOI

Space-Time Approach to Non-Relativistic Quantum Mechanics

Richard Phillips Feynman
- 01 Apr 1948 - 
- Vol. 20, Iss: 2, pp 367-387
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TLDR
In this paper, the authors formulated non-relativistic quantum mechanics in a different way and showed that the probability of an event which can happen in several different ways is the absolute square of a sum of complex contributions, one from each alternative way.
Abstract
Non-relativistic quantum mechanics is formulated here in a different way. It is, however, mathematically equivalent to the familiar formulation. In quantum mechanics the probability of an event which can happen in several different ways is the absolute square of a sum of complex contributions, one from each alternative way. The probability that a particle will be found to have a path x(t) lying somewhere within a region of space time is the square of a sum of contributions, one from each path in the region. The contribution from a single path is postulated to be an exponential whose (imaginary) phase is the classical action (in units of ℏ) for the path in question. The total contribution from all paths reaching x, t from the past is the wave function ψ(x, t). This is shown to satisfy Schroedinger's equation. The relation to matrix and operator algebra is discussed. Applications are indicated, in particular to eliminate the coordinates of the field oscillators from the equations of quantum electrodynamics.

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Filtered propagator functional for iterative dynamics of quantum dissipative systems

TL;DR: In this paper, a Fortran program is described which calculates the reduced density matrix of a one-dimensional quantum mechanical continuous or discrete system coupled to a harmonic dissipative environment, based on Feynman's path integral formulation of time-dependent quantum mechanics.
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Efficient Simulation of Finite-Temperature Open Quantum Systems.

TL;DR: It is proved that the system dynamics under thermal environments can be nonperturbatively described by temperature-dependent system-environmental couplings with the initial environment state being in its pure vacuum state, instead of a mixed thermal state.
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Schwinger functions for the Yukawa model in two dimensions with space-time cutoff

TL;DR: In this article, it was shown that a Euclidean version of the formulae of Matthews and Salam for the Green's functions of a two-dimensional Yukawa model with interaction in a finite space-time volume makes sense, if renormalized correctly.
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Real-time Feynman path integral with Picard–Lefschetz theory and its applications to quantum tunneling

TL;DR: In this article, the authors apply the Picard-Lefschetz theory to path integrals of quantum mechanics, in order to compute real-time dynamics directly, and demonstrate its computational method in a concrete way by solving three simple examples of quantum quantum mechanics.
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The path integral for a particle in curved spaces and Weyl anomalies

TL;DR: In this paper, a path integral for a particle moving in curved spaces is analyzed in a manifestly covariant way and by making use of ghost fields, which allows us to represent the path-integral measure in a form suitable for performing the perturbative expansion.