The elliptic evolution of non-self-adjoint degree-2 Hamiltonians

Abstract

We study the relationship between the classical Hamilton flow and the quantum Schr\"odinger evolution where the Hamiltonian is a degree-2 complex-valued polynomial. When the flow obeys a strict positivity condition equivalent to compactness of the evolution operator, we find geometric expressions for the $L^2$ operator norm and a singular-value decomposition of the Schr\"odinger evolution, using the Hamilton flow. The flow also gives a geometric composition law for these operators, which correspond to a large class of integral operators with nondegenerate Gaussian kernels.