The spectrogram expansion of Wigner functions

Abstract

Wigner functions generically attain negative values and hence are not probability densities. We prove an asymptotic expansion of Wigner functions in terms of Hermite spectrograms, which are probability densities. The expansion provides exact formulas for the quantum expectations of polynomial observables. In the high frequency regime it allows to approximate quantum expectation values up to any order of accuracy in the high frequency parameter. We present a Markov Chain Monte Carlo method to sample from the new densities and illustrate our findings by numerical experiments.