DeDonder-Weyl theory and a hypercomplex extension of quantum mechanics to field theory

Abstract

A quantization of field theory based on the DeDonder-Weyl covariant Hamiltonian formulation is discussed. A hypercomplex extension of quantum mechanics, in which the space-time Clifford algebra replaces that of the complex numbers, appears as a result of quantization of Poisson brackets of differential forms put forward for the DeDonder-Weyl formulation earlier. The proposed covariant hypercomplex Schr\"odinger equation is shown to lead in the classical limit to the DeDonder-Weyl Hamilton-Jacobi equation and to obey the Ehrenfest principle in the sense that the DeDonder-Weyl canonical field equations are satisfied for the expectation values of properly chosen operators.