Notes on the phase space formulation of the propagator of Hamiltonians with spatially-dependent kinetic energy

Abstract

These short notes present to the reader (students, in particular) a concise approach to the derivation of the propagator of Hamiltonians with position-dependent kinetic energy. The formalism is applied to the von Roos Hamiltonian with arbitrary ordering ambiguity parameters, and a simple scheme to convert the problem to a constant-mass motion is presented. The motion in curved spaces is treated along the same lines, where a phase space formulation is used to derive the propagator for arbitrary discretization choices.