Procedure of ordering a product operators
This article is about rearranging a product of operators in physics. For the well-orderings on mathematical terms, see
Path ordering (term rewriting).
In
theoretical physics, path-ordering is the procedure (or a
meta-operator ) that orders a product of operators according to the value of a chosen
parameter:
Here p is a
permutation that orders the parameters by value:
For example:
Examples
If an
operator is not simply expressed as a product, but as a function of another operator, we must first perform a
Taylor expansion of this function. This is the case of the
Wilson loop, which is defined as a path-
ordered exponential to guarantee that the Wilson loop encodes the
holonomy of the
gauge connection. The parameter σ that determines the ordering is a parameter describing the
contour, and because the contour is closed, the Wilson loop must be defined as a
trace in order to be
gauge-invariant.
Time ordering
In
quantum field theory it is useful to take the time-ordered product of operators. This operation is denoted by . (Although is often called the "time-ordering operator", strictly speaking it is neither an
operator on states nor a
superoperator on operators.)
For two operators A(x) and B(y) that depend on spacetime locations x and y we define:
Here and denote the invariant scalar time-coordinates of the points x and y.
[1]
Explicitly we have
where denotes the
Heaviside step function and the depends on if the operators are
bosonic or
fermionic in nature. If bosonic, then the + sign is always chosen, if fermionic then the sign will depend on the number of operator interchanges necessary to achieve the proper time ordering. Note that the statistical factors do not enter here.
Since the operators depend on their location in spacetime (i.e. not just time) this time-ordering operation is only coordinate independent if operators at
spacelike separated points
commute. This is why it is necessary to use rather than , since usually indicates the coordinate dependent time-like index of the spacetime point. Note that the time-ordering is usually written with the time argument increasing from right to left.
In general, for the product of n field operators A1(t1), …, An(tn) the time-ordered product of operators are defined as follows:
where the sum runs all over p's and over the
symmetric group of n degree permutations and
The
S-matrix in
quantum field theory is an example of a time-ordered product. The S-matrix, transforming the state at t = −∞ to a state at t = +∞, can also be thought of as a kind of "
holonomy", analogous to the
Wilson loop. We obtain a time-ordered expression because of the following reason:
We start with this simple formula for the exponential
Now consider the discretized
evolution operator
where is the evolution operator over an infinitesimal time interval . The higher order terms can be neglected in the limit . The operator is defined by
Note that the evolution operators over the "past" time intervals appears on the right side of the product. We see that the formula is analogous to the identity above satisfied by the exponential, and we may write
The only subtlety we had to include was the time-ordering operator because the factors in the product defining S above were time-ordered, too (and operators do not commute in general) and the operator ensures that this ordering will be preserved.
See also
References