The representation theory of decoherence functionals in history quantum theories

Abstract

In the first part of this paper the general perspective of history quantum theories is reviewed. History quantum theories provide a conceptual and mathematical framework for formulating quantum theories without a globally defined Hamiltonian time evolution and for introducing the concept of space time event into quantum theory. On a mathematical level a history quantum theory is characterized by the space of histories, which represent the space time events, and by the space of decoherence functionals which represent the quantum mechanical states in the history approach. The second part of this paper is devoted to the study of the structure of the space of decoherence functionals for some physically reasonable spaces of histories in some detail. The temporal reformulation of standard Hamiltonian quantum theories suggests to consider the case that the space of histories is given by (i) the lattice of projection operators on some Hilbert space or -- slightly more general -- (ii) the set of projection operators in some von Neumann algebra. In the case (i) the conditions are identified under which decoherence functionals can be represented by, respectively, trace class operators, bounded operators or families of trace class operators on the tensor product of the underlying Hilbert space by itself. Moreover we shall discuss the naturally arising representations of decoherence functionals as sesquilinear forms. The paper ends with a discussion of the consequences of the results for the general axiomatic framework of history theories.