Path integral action of a particle in the non commutative plane

Abstract

Non commutative quantum mechanics can be viewed as a quantum system represented in the space of Hilbert-Schmidt operators acting on non commutative configuration space. Taking this as departure point, we formulate a coherent state approach to the path integral representation of the transition amplitude. From this we derive an action for a particle moving in the non commutative plane and in the presence of an arbitrary potential. We find that this action is non local in time. However, this non locality can be removed by introducing an auxilary field, which leads to a second class constrained system that yields the non commutative Heisenberg algebra upon quantization. Using this action the propagator of the free particle and harmonic oscillator are computed explicitly. For the harmonic oscillator this action yields the frequencies already obtained by other means in the literature.