Anti-Quill Part 9: Quantization-2 | Geometric Quantization

 The aim now is to answer what really defines a quantum mechanical system or a quantum field theory, which in a sense is "field degrees of freedom" (quotes because this is very non-trivial physically) that we obtain from some classical mechanical system or a classical field theory. A classical theory consists of a phase space $T^{*}M$ that is a symplectic manifold $(\mathbb{R}^{2n}, \omega )$ and observables are functions $f\in C^{\infty }(T^{*}M)$ that are elements of a Poisson algebra $\mathcal{P}$. which comes with Poisson brackets $\{\cdot , \cdot \} : C^{\infty }\times C^{\infty }\to C^{\infty }(M)$. Quantum observables are then going to be operators on some $\mathcal{A}(\mathcal{H})$ with a commutator $[\cdot, \cdot ]$ on $\mathcal{H}$. Quantization is then just a function $Q: C^{\infty }(\mathbb{R}^{2n})\to L(\mathcal{H})$, space of linear operators on $\mathcal{H}$. In stronger operator algebraic terms we would actually be more careful about what we do with this (i.e. selecting $\mathcal{B}(\mathcal{H})$), but for now we can be more superficial. So the problem is really just going from this classical phase space to a quantum Hilbert space. Note that I specifically said "quantum Hilbert space", since it is usually easier to obtain a pre-quantum Hilbert space from pre-quantization, where we identify from our Poisson manifold a collection of a hermitian line bundle, a connection on this line bundle and a Hilbert space that is etymologically one but not the actual constrained Hilbert space -- in this abuse of terminology one can consider this pre-quantum Hilbert space the auxiliary Hilbert space, on which polarization is done. I will not get into what polarization actually does for now, but this is typically the actual quantization problem. After polarization, we will end up with the actual quantum Hilbert space, which would be the quantised theory. 

So what we did here is called geometric quantization, which is only one of many sorts of quantization. The aim here is of course to end up with a Hilbert space. In a similar fashion, you could ask what happens with field theories. A classical field theory, after all, is also equipped with Poisson algebras and eventually we want to quantize this. Since QFTs describe algebras of observables, you could define it as really a functor from categories of globally hyperbolic manifolds to those of $C^{*}$-algebras satisfying the Haag-Kastler axioms. However, the obvious issue is that field theories have infinite degrees of freedom and therefore the phase space is infinite dimensional. In such cases you would do the so-called refined algebraic quantization, which will be a different post eventually. This was in fact, touched upon in the Hilbert space of de Sitter quantum gravity paper by Suvrat et al, without realising the full technicalities of what they were doing! On the other hand, a more suitable general scheme is that of deformation quantization where the Poisson brackets are "deformed" into commutators. Then there is stochastic quantization and more interestingly, Berezin-Toeplitz quantization which has to do with compact symplectic manifolds and Kostant–Souriau operators, which are related to the Hamiltonian vector field in a certain condition, which I am not entirely sure about.

Anti-Quill Part 8: Quantization-1

  In physics a very natural construction is that of quantization, where we take a classical system and quantize it. This involves, to be very naive, taking a symplectic pair $(M, \omega )$ and turning the functions in $L^{2}(M)$ into operators, and the Poisson brackets $\{\cdot, \cdot \}$ into commutators $[\cdot, \cdot ]$. But getting to $L^{2}(M)$ is hard. In fact, prequantization is as far as we've gotten to here. The objective at the end of the day is to take this symplectic manifold we have and obtain a Hilbert space. Really, what you would work with would be subspaces and not $L^{2}$ spaces, etc etc. There's many sides to how you do this though. In fact, this is a very crucial part of physics -- or in broad terms mathematical physics, since a lot of the developments in this field come not from physicists but from mathematicians. E.g. deformation quantization was formulated by Maxim Kontsevich (the "t" comes before the "s", this comment is directed at my collaborator), a lot of geometric quantization was done by mathematicians just trying to do symplectic geometry and brane quantization, while initiated by Gukov and Witten and is of interest to string theorists primarily, is also of interest for differential geometry and representation theorists. The case with brane quantization is that there's boundary conditions involving Lagrangian and coisotropic A-branes, and stuff I don't fully understand yet. See Gukov-Witten and Gaiotto-Witten for more about this. Interestingly, the ordinary sort of quantization that physicists do is not fully meaningful either. A good example is the work by Suvrat et al on the Hilbert space of de Sitter quantum gravity, where you take the ordinary Hilbert space (obtained from Dirac quantization) and you have to solve the constraints next, for which you define the rigging map and do group-averaging. This forms the so-called refined algebraic quantization scheme, which is really just Dirac quantization extended. So even though quantization as a term seems trivial from undergrad physics a la canonical quantization, the actual mathematically clear way to do it is very nontrivial and they branch out into several formalisms. In the words of Ludwig Faddeev, "quantization is an art, not a science". More on this soon.