Short-Time Propagators and the Born--Jordan Quantization Rule

Abstract

We have shown in previous work that the equivalence of the Heisenberg and Schr\"odinger pictures of quantum mechanics requires the use of the Born and Jordan quantization rules. In the present work, we give further evidence that the Born--Jordan rule is the correct quantization scheme for quantum mechanics. For this purpose, we use correct short-time approximations to the action functional, which lead to the desired quantization of the classical Hamiltonian. We thus prove that a previous argument of Kerner and Sutcliffe, refuted by Cohen, is correct.