The Theory of Quantum Levy Processes

Abstract

Various recent results on quantum Lévy processes are presented. The first part provides an introduction to the theory of Lévy processes on involutive bialgebras. The notion of independence used for these processes is tensor independence, which generalizes the notion of independence used in classical probability and corresponds to independent observables in quantum physics. In quantum probability there exist other notions of independence and Lévy processes can also be defined for the five so-called universal independences. This is the topic of the second part. In particular, it is shown that boolean, monotone, and anti-monotone independence can be reduced to tensor independence. Finally, in the third part, several classes of quantum Lévy processes of special interest are considered, e.g., Lévy processes on real Lie algebras or Brownian motions on braided spaces. Several applications of these processes are also presented.