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# Symmetric Classical Mechanics

## 1 Introduction

The relation between classical and quantum mechanics is beset by a number of quite subtle problems. On one side the quantum formulation of a given dynamical system is typically obtained by applying a quantization prescription to the classical formulation of the system. There are several different quantization prescriptions that one might use. However, all of them display order problems, which means that there is an ambiguity in the choice of the quantum system that corresponds to the original classical one. On the other hand one expects that for an adequate choice of quantum initial data, satisfying some general conditions, the quantum formulation of most dynamical systems should be able to reproduce the predictions of the original classical formulation . Nevertheless, it is still not completely clear what these general conditions should be . This has been an active field of research. Firstly because it constitutes a fundamental problem. Quantum mechanics is believed to provide the most fundamental description of all physical systems. Many of these systems display a classical behaviour. Therefore, quantum mechanics should be able to explain the emergence of a classical domain and moreover to reproduce the predictions of classical mechanics. Secondly, because grasping the conditions that determine the emergence of a classical domain is expected to play an important role in several different fields of research like for instance, quantum cosmology, quantization of closed dynamical systems and semiclassical gravity , just to name a few.

This paper concerns the problem of the semiclassical limit of quantum mechanics. More precisely, we want to investigate whether the semiclassical limit of quantum mechanics might be correctly described by a classical dynamical structure different from ordinary classical mechanics. Our motivation comes from a set of results presented elsewhere . There we were able to prove that when the quantum initial data of an arbitrary dynamical system satisfy a set of classicality criteria the quantum predictions will be consistent (in some precise sense) with the predictions of the classical formulation of the system. The derivation of the criteria points out an interesting fact: for a general set of quantum initial data satisfying the criteria the classical predictions that display the highest degree of consistency with the quantum predictions are not the ones obtained by using the standard formulation of classical mechanics. In this paper the aim is to derive the dynamical framework that provides these new classical predictions. As a result a new theory of classical mechanics will be presented. The theory will be named symmetric classical mechanics and its properties will be studied thoroughly. In particular we will see that: i) The new theory displays a fully consistent canonical structure, ii) the quantization prescription for symmetric classical mechanics is an isomorphism between the classical and quantum algebras of observables and is then not riddled with ordering ambiguities, iii) continuous canonical transformations and, in particular, the time evolution are generated by unitary operators, iv) the time-evolution unitary operator is the solution of a classical version of the Schrödinger equation, v) the limit of symmetric classical mechanics as $`\mathrm{}0`$ is standard classical mechanics and finally, vi) we venture the possibility that symmetric classical mechanics could be trivially coupled to quantum mechanics to obtain a consistent theory of hybrid classical-quantum dynamics.

Most of the previous properties are a direct consequence of the fact that the dynamical structure of symmetric classical mechanics is given by the Moyal bracket. This is a Lie bracket that can be obtained by a deformation of the Poisson bracket . It was first derived  as the dynamical structure for the Wigner distribution function formulation of quantum mechanics  and has been used as the starting point for a number of semiclassical approximation procedures  namely in the context of the quantum dynamics of classically chaotic systems . Extensive reviews of the Moyal-Weyl-Wigner formulation of quantum mechanics are given in . Here, instead, we derive the Moyal bracket as the dynamical structure of the semiclassical limit of quantum mechanics proving, as a by-product, that classical and quantum dynamics can be formulated in terms of the same bracket structure.

## 2 Classicality Criteria

In a previous paper  we developed two different classicality criteria providing a measure of the degree of classicality of an arbitrary quantum system. The formalism presented can be summarized in three main steps:

1) Let us consider an arbitrary dynamical system with $`N`$ degrees of freedom. Let $`(q_i,p_i)`$, $`1=1..N`$ or simply $`O_i`$, $`i=\mathrm{1..2}N`$ be a set of canonical variables spanning the phase space of the system. Classical and quantum mechanics provide two alternative descriptions of the configuration of the system at an arbitrary time $`t_0`$. The classical description is given by a set of values $`O_i^0=O_i(t_0)`$ for the canonical variables plus the associated error margins $`\delta _i`$. The quantum description is given by the physical wave function $`|\varphi >`$ belonging to the physical Hilbert space $``$. The first step is to provide a measure of the consistency of these two descriptions. In  we proposed two such consistency criteria. Let us review one of them:

Let $`0p<1`$ be an arbitrary probability. Let $`M`$ be some positive integer and let us consider the set of intervals of the type:

$$I_i(p,M)=[O_i^0\frac{\delta _i}{(1p)^{1/(2M)}},O_i^0+\frac{\delta _i}{(1p)^{1/(2M)}}],$$
(1)
associated to each classical observable $`O_i`$. In each of the previous intervals we can calculate the probability $`p_i`$ generated by the wave function $`|\varphi >`$, in the representation of the corresponding quantum observable $`\widehat{O}_i`$:

$$p_i(p,M)=\underset{a_iI_i(p,M),k}{}|<a_i,k|\varphi >|^2,$$
(2)
where $`|a_i,k>`$ is the general eigenvector of $`\widehat{O}_i`$ with eigenvalue $`a_i`$ and degeneracy index $`k`$. For given values of the classical and quantum data $`O_i^0`$, $`\delta _i`$ and $`|\varphi >`$, this probability is an exclusive function of $`p`$ and $`M`$. We can now state the consistency criterion:

Definition 1 \- Consistency Criterion
The classical and quantum data, describing a given configuration of the dynamical system will be $`M`$-order consistent if and only if for all $`0p<1`$ and all $`i=1,\mathrm{},2N`$ the condition $`p_i(p,M)p`$ is satisfied, i.e.;

$$\underset{a_iI_i(p,M),k}{}|<a_i,k|\varphi >|^2p,p[0,1[,i=1,\mathrm{},2N,$$
(3)
where $`I_i(p,M)`$ is given by eq.(1).

This criterion provides a measure of how peaked the wave function is - in the representation of each of the quantum observables - around the classical error margin of the corresponding classical observable. Notice that, in particular, the higher the degree of consistency the bigger the probability that a quantum measurement provides a value inside the corresponding classical error interval.

2) The second and main step in developing the classicality criterion was the derivation of the following expansion:

$`\widehat{A}A`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{i=1}{\overset{2N}{}}}{\displaystyle \frac{A}{O_i}}(\widehat{O}_iO_i)+{\displaystyle \frac{1}{2}}{\displaystyle \underset{i,j=1}{\overset{2N}{}}}{\displaystyle \frac{^2A}{O_iO_j}}(\widehat{O}_iO_i)(\widehat{O}_jO_j)+\mathrm{}.`$ (4)
where $`\widehat{A}`$ is a general operator, $`\widehat{A}=F(\widehat{O}_i)`$ and $`A`$ is some classical version (which version is yet to be discussed) of $`\widehat{A}`$, $`A=G(O_i)`$. If the expansion (4) is valid then we can easily obtain the following relation:

$`<E^m(\widehat{A},\varphi ,A^0)|E^m(\widehat{A},\varphi ,A^0)>`$ (5)
$`{\displaystyle \underset{i_1=1}{\overset{2N}{}}}\mathrm{}{\displaystyle \underset{i_m=1}{\overset{2N}{}}}{\displaystyle \underset{j_1=1}{\overset{2N}{}}}\mathrm{}{\displaystyle \underset{j_m=1}{\overset{2N}{}}}{\displaystyle \underset{k=1}{\overset{m}{}}}{\displaystyle \underset{s=1}{\overset{m}{}}}{\displaystyle \frac{A}{O_{i_k}}}|_{O_{ik}=O_{ik}^0}\left({\displaystyle \frac{A}{O_{j_s}}}\right)^{}|_{O_{js}=O_{js}^0}<E_{O_{i1},\mathrm{},O_{im}}|E_{O_{j1},\mathrm{},O_{jm}}>+\mathrm{}`$
where $`A^0=G(O_i^0)`$ and $`|E_X^m>=|E^m(\widehat{X},\varphi ,X^0)>`$ is named the mth-order error ket of the operator $`\widehat{X}`$ around the classical value $`X^0`$ and is given by $`|E_X^m>=(\widehat{X}X^0)^m|\varphi >`$ for all $`m𝒩`$. Moreover, $`|E_{O_{j1},\mathrm{},O_{jm}}>=(\widehat{O}_{j_1}O_{j_1}^0)\mathrm{}.(\widehat{O}_{j_m}O_{j_m}^0)|\varphi >`$ is named the $`m`$-order mixed error ket. The most important property of the error ket framework is the following: if $`<E_X^m|E_X^m>\mathrm{\Delta }^{2m}`$ then, in the representation of $`\widehat{X}`$ the wave function $`|\varphi >`$ has at least a probability $`p`$ confined to the interval $`I_m=[X^0\frac{\mathrm{\Delta }}{(1p)^{1/2m}},X^0+\frac{\mathrm{\Delta }}{(1p)^{1/2m}}]`$. That is, $`|\varphi >`$ is m-order consistent with the classical interval $`[X^0\mathrm{\Delta },X^0+\mathrm{\Delta }]`$ (check for the consistency criterion in step 1). The reader should refer to  for a detailed discussion of the error ket formalism.

This property points out a quite obvious way of developing a classicality criterion. Let us assume for the moment that (4) is valid for $`\widehat{A}=\widehat{O}_i(t)`$ and $`A=O_i(t)`$, $`i=\mathrm{1..2}N`$ (where $`O_i(t)`$ is some classical version of $`\widehat{O}_i(t)`$ \- see point 3)) and let us consider all the sequences of observables $`S_{i_k}=O_{i_1},\mathrm{}.,O_{i_n}`$ associated to the sequences of values $`i_k=i_1,..,i_n\{\mathrm{1..2}N\}`$ such that:

$$\frac{A}{S_{ik}}=\frac{^nA}{O_{i1}\mathrm{}O_{in}}0,$$
(6)
for some classical observable $`A=O_i(t),i=\mathrm{1..2}N`$. Let also $`S_{ik}^m`$ be an array of $`m`$ arbitrary sequences $`S_{ik}`$. Moreover, we define $`\delta _{S_{ik}^m}`$ to be the product of all error margins associated with the observables included in $`S_{ik}^m`$. We proposed the set of relations,

$$<E_{S_{ik}^m}|E_{S_{ik}^m}>\delta _{S_{ik}^m}^2,mM,$$
(7)
as a classicality criterion. Notice that given the classical initial data $`(O_i^0,\delta _i)`$, the set of inequalities (7) constitute a set of conditions (classicality conditions) on the functional form of the initial data wave function $`|\varphi >`$. If a certain dynamical system with some given initial data satisfies these relations up to order $`m=M`$, then we say that the system is $`M`$-order classical. In this case it is straightforward to obtain from (5) that:

$$<E_A^M|E_A^M>\left(\underset{i=1}{\overset{2N}{}}\left|\frac{A}{O_i}\right|_{O_i=O_i^0}\delta _i+\mathrm{}\right)^{2M}=\delta _A^{2M}$$
(8)
and thus we can state that if $`|\varphi >`$ satisfies (7) up to order $`M`$ then not only $`|\varphi >`$ is $`M`$-order consistent with the initial time classical description, but also all future classical and quantum descriptions of the configuration of the system are $`M`$-order consistent.

3) The key step to obtain the classicality criterion was the derivation of the relation (4). Given $`\widehat{A}`$ it is clear that this relation is not valid for an arbitrary $`A`$. In fact $`A`$ should be obtained from $`\widehat{A}`$ by following a well defined procedure that was named dequantization. In , we proved that if this dequantization is the inverse of the Dirac quantization map , then the general relation (4) is not exactly valid, being however a very good approximation. More precisely, we proved that for $`A`$ obtained from the operator $`\widehat{A}`$ by applying the Dirac dequantization map, the difference between the right- and left-hand sides of eq.(4) is, at most proportional to a factor of $`\mathrm{}^2`$.

On the other hand, if $`\widehat{A}`$ in eq.(4) is the time-evolution of some initial observable $`\widehat{O}_i(0)`$ (i.e. $`\widehat{A}=\widehat{O}_i(t)`$ ), then $`A`$, the observable obtained by applying the Dirac dequantization map to $`\widehat{A}`$, is just the time evolution of the classical observable $`O_i(0)`$, that is $`A=O_i(t)`$. To proceed, let us define the semiclassical limit of the quantum operator $`\widehat{A}`$ to be the classical observable $`A_S`$ that fully validates the expansion (4). We can now restate our statement made in the previous paragraph in the following terms: The observable $`O_i(t)`$ is not the semiclassical limit of the quantum observable $`\widehat{O}_i(t)`$ (i.e. $`O_i(t)A_S`$) and hence does not allow for the exact statement that if the classical and quantum initial data satisfy the set of relations (7), then the classical and quantum predictions will be $`M`$-order consistent at all times (8). Still, $`O_i(t)`$ provides a prediction that diverges from the correct semiclassical limit one by a factor proportional to $`\mathrm{}^2`$ at most (i.e. $`O_i(t)=A_S+𝒪(\mathrm{}^2)`$). This means that the standard classical prediction is well inside the error interval associated with the semiclassical limit prediction.

Consequently, the results of  allow us to conclude that: i) Classical mechanics does not provide the exact semiclassical limit for quantum systems with a set of initial data satisfying (7). ii) Still, classical mechanics provides a very similar prediction to the exact semiclassical limit one.

In this paper we want to obtain the exact form of the classical observables that fully validates the expansion (4). More important, the aim is to derive a consistent dynamical framework able to provide those semiclassical limit observables directly from the classical initial data.

## 3 Symmetric Dequantization

The complete set of fundamental hermitian operators $`S=\{\widehat{O}_i,i=1,\mathrm{},2N\}`$ spans the algebra $`\widehat{𝒜}`$ of operators acting on the Hilbert space $``$,

$$\widehat{𝒜}\{\widehat{A}:\widehat{A}=\underset{i=1}{\overset{n}{}}c_i\underset{j=1}{\overset{m}{}}\widehat{O}_{ij};n,m𝒩,c_i𝒞\},$$
(9)
where $`\widehat{O}_{ij}S`$. Consequently, the set

$$\widehat{}\left\{\widehat{O}_{i_1i_2\mathrm{}i_k}\widehat{O}_{i_1}\widehat{O}_{i_2}\mathrm{}\widehat{O}_{i_k};1i_1,i_2,\mathrm{},i_k2N,k𝒩\right\}$$
(10)
generates all the elements of $`\widehat{𝒜}`$. We stress the fact that the order of the operators in the product $`\widehat{O}_{i_1i_2\mathrm{}i_k}`$ is meaningful.

$`\widehat{𝒜}`$ is thus an infinite dimensional complex vector space together with the bracket rule,

$$[\widehat{A},\widehat{B}]\widehat{A}\widehat{B}\widehat{B}\widehat{A},\widehat{A},\widehat{B}\widehat{𝒜}.$$
(11)
The set of fundamental operators $`S`$ is decomposed into $`N`$ pairs of variables, $`(\widehat{q}_i,\widehat{p}_i)`$, with $`i=1,\mathrm{},N`$ and:

$$\begin{array}{cc}\widehat{O}_i=\widehat{q}_i,\hfill & i=1,\mathrm{},N,\hfill \\ \widehat{O}_i=\widehat{p}_{iN},\hfill & i=N+1,\mathrm{},2N.\hfill \end{array}$$
(12)
These pairs are canonically conjugate in the sense that:

$$\begin{array}{ccc}[\widehat{q}_i,\widehat{q}_j]=\hfill & [\widehat{p}_i,\widehat{p}_j]=0;\hfill & \hfill [\widehat{q}_i,\widehat{p}_j]=i\mathrm{}\delta _{ij}.\end{array}$$
(13)
Let $`T^{}M`$ be the phase space of the corresponding classical system and $`𝒜`$ the algebra of classical observables, $`𝒜\{fC^{\mathrm{}}:T^{}M𝒞\}`$. Let us define the dequantization map, $`V`$: $`\widehat{𝒜}𝒜`$, such that $`V\mathrm{\Lambda }=1`$, where $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$ is the Dirac quantization map . This map attributes a classical variable to every quantum operator.

Let then $`A=V(\widehat{A})`$. We saw in  that if $`A`$ is obtained from $`\widehat{A}`$ using the map $`V`$ then, in general, the expansion (4) is not exactly valid, the right and left hand sides displaying a difference of the order of $`\mathrm{}^2`$ at most. Consequently, all subsequent results, including eq.(8) display an imprecision of the order of $`\mathrm{}^2`$. Therefore the conclusion that if a given set of classical and quantum initial data are $`M`$-order classical, then their time evolution will always be $`M`$-order consistent, is only valid up to a correction - of the classical prediction - by a term proportional to $`\mathrm{}^2`$. Moreover, the map $`V`$ is beset by order problems: it is neither univocous nor injective, as illustrated by the two following examples: let $`\widehat{q}`$, $`\widehat{p}`$ be the two fundamental operators of a one dimensional quantum system and consider the two following hermitian operators: $`\widehat{A}=\widehat{q}\widehat{p}^2\widehat{q}`$ and $`\widehat{B}=1/2(\widehat{q}^2\widehat{p}^2+\widehat{p}^2\widehat{q}^2)`$. Clearly, $`\widehat{A}\widehat{B}`$ and yet one possible Dirac dequantization yields:

$$V(\widehat{A})=q^2p^2\text{and}V(\widehat{B})=q^2p^2$$

and thus the map $`V`$ is not injective. Using the same example we also have: $`\widehat{A}=\widehat{B}+\mathrm{}^2`$ and yet:

$$V(\widehat{A})=q^2p^2V(\widehat{B}+\mathrm{}^2)=q^2p^2+\mathrm{}^2$$

and so the map $`V`$ is not univocous either.

We see that there are many different ways of dequantizing a system. This should come as no surprise since the Dirac quantization map is itself not one to one. As a consequence the classical algebra $`𝒜`$ which is spanned by:

$$\left\{O_{i_1i_2\mathrm{}i_k}O_{i_1}O_{i_2}\mathrm{}O_{i_k};1i_1,i_2,\mathrm{},i_k2N,k𝒩\right\},$$
(14)
where this time the order of the observables is immaterial, shows no straightforward relation with $`\widehat{}`$.

The whole framework described in the last section (and in particular the expansion (4)) is exactly valid if the classical observables $`A`$ are obtained (through a trivial substitution of the fundamental observables $`\widehat{O}_i`$ by the classical ones $`O_i`$) from a fully symmetric form of $`\widehat{A}`$ . Consequently, the aim now is to present a dequantization map that, given an arbitrary quantum observable $`\widehat{A}`$, yields the classical observable $`A_S`$.

Let us thus introduce the ”symmetric dequantization” prescription. Any operator in the algebra $`\widehat{𝒜}`$ can be cast in the form of a linear combination of fully symmetrized polynomia of the fundamental operators. Consider e.g. $`\widehat{p}\widehat{q}`$:

$$\widehat{p}\widehat{q}=\frac{1}{2}(\widehat{p}\widehat{q}+\widehat{q}\widehat{p})+\frac{1}{2}[\widehat{p},\widehat{q}](\widehat{p}\widehat{q})_++\frac{1}{2}[\widehat{p},\widehat{q}],$$
(15)
where $`(\widehat{p}\widehat{q})_+1/2(\widehat{p}\widehat{q}+\widehat{q}\widehat{p})`$ is the completely symmetrized product. Since $`[\widehat{p},\widehat{q}]=i\mathrm{}`$ is a c-number, we have achieved the expansion of $`\widehat{p}\widehat{q}`$ in the basis of the fully symmetrized operators.

H.Weyl was the first to suggest that any operator could be expanded as a sum of completely symmetric terms, . He proposed the following rule. A given operator $`\widehat{b}(\widehat{\stackrel{}{q}},\widehat{\stackrel{}{p}})`$ is represented in the form:

$$\widehat{b}(\widehat{\stackrel{}{q}},\widehat{\stackrel{}{p}})=𝑑\stackrel{}{x}𝑑\stackrel{}{y}\beta (\stackrel{}{x},\stackrel{}{y})\mathrm{exp}\left(i\stackrel{}{x}\widehat{\stackrel{}{q}}+i\stackrel{}{y}\widehat{\stackrel{}{p}}\right),$$

where $`\stackrel{}{x}`$ and $`\stackrel{}{y}`$ are two $`N`$-dimensional vectors whose components are c-numbers, $`\widehat{\stackrel{}{q}}=(\widehat{q}_1,\mathrm{},\widehat{q}_N)`$, $`\widehat{\stackrel{}{p}}=(\widehat{p}_1,\mathrm{},\widehat{p}_N)`$ and $`\beta (\stackrel{}{x},\stackrel{}{y})=\beta ^{}(\stackrel{}{x},\stackrel{}{y})`$ is some numerical function (possibly singular). The previous condition ensures the hermiticity of the operator. If the position $`\widehat{q}_j`$ appears $`n`$ times and the momentum $`\widehat{p}_k`$ appears $`m`$ times in a given operator, then we include terms of the form<sup>3</sup><sup>3</sup>3$`\delta ^{(n)}(x)`$ is the $`n`$-th derivative of the delta-function with respect to its argument. $`i^n\delta ^{(n)}(x_j)`$ and $`i^m\delta ^{(m)}(y_k)`$, respectively, in the function $`\beta (\stackrel{}{x},\stackrel{}{y})`$. We equally include factors $`\delta (x_l)`$ and $`\delta (y_s)`$ for all $`\widehat{q}_l`$ and $`\widehat{p}_s`$ that are absent in the operator.

As an example, consider a system with one degree of freedom ($`N=1`$) and some operator where $`\widehat{q}`$ appears twice and $`\widehat{p}`$ once. From the previous rule we get the completely symmetric operator:

$$\widehat{b}(\widehat{q},\widehat{p})=𝑑x𝑑y\left[i^2\delta ^{^{\prime \prime }}(x)\right]\left[i\delta ^{^{}}(y)\right]\mathrm{exp}\left(ix\widehat{q}+iy\widehat{p}\right)=\frac{1}{3}\left(\widehat{q}^2\widehat{p}+\widehat{q}\widehat{p}\widehat{q}+\widehat{p}\widehat{q}^2\right).$$

There is a clear advantage in using the symmetric version of quantum mechanics. The set $`\widehat{}_+`$ of symmetrized products,

$$\widehat{}_+\left\{\left(\widehat{O}_{i_1i_2\mathrm{}i_k}\right)_+\left(\widehat{O}_{i_1}\widehat{O}_{i_2}\mathrm{}\widehat{O}_{i_k}\right)_+;1i_1,i_2,\mathrm{},i_k2N,k𝒩\right\},$$
(16)
constitutes a basis for $`\widehat{𝒜}`$. In fact it is easy to check that its elements are linearly independent and moreover that all elements of $`\widehat{𝒜}`$ can be expanded in terms of the elements of $`\widehat{}_+`$. On the other hand, in the completely symmetric product $`\left(\widehat{O}_{i_1}\widehat{O}_{i_2}\mathrm{}\widehat{O}_{i_k}\right)_+`$ the order of the operators is immaterial and therefore $`\widehat{}_+`$ and $``$ have the same number of elements. As a side remark we conclude that $`\widehat{}`$ is overcomplete. We can thus define the dequantization map $`V_S`$ in the following way:

Definition 2 \- Symmetric Dequantization
The dequantization map $`V_S:`$ $`\widehat{𝒜}𝒜`$ is defined by the following rules:
1) $`V_S`$ is a linear map;
2) $`V_S`$ maps the identity to the identity;
3) $`V_S\left(\left(\widehat{O}_{i_1}\widehat{O}_{i_2}\mathrm{}\widehat{O}_{i_k}\right)_+\right)=O_{i_1}O_{i_2}\mathrm{}O_{i_k},\text{for all }\left(\widehat{O}_{i_1}\widehat{O}_{i_2}\mathrm{}\widehat{O}_{i_k}\right)_+\widehat{}_+`$.

Let us study some of the properties of $`V_S`$:
a) For a generic operator $`\widehat{A}`$ we have:

$$V_S(\widehat{A})A=V_S\left(\underset{i=1}{\overset{n}{}}c_i\left(\underset{j=1}{\overset{m}{}}\widehat{O}_{ij}\right)_+\right)=\underset{i=1}{\overset{n}{}}c_i\underset{j=1}{\overset{m}{}}O_{ij},$$
(17)
where $`_{i=1}^nc_i\left(_{j=1}^m\widehat{O}_{ij}\right)_+`$ is the expansion of the operator $`\widehat{A}`$ in the basis $`\widehat{}_+`$.
b) $`V_S\left([\widehat{O}_i,\widehat{O}_j]\right)=i\mathrm{}\{O_i,O_j\}`$, where $`\{,\}`$ is the Poisson bracket defined by:

$$\{A,B\}\underset{i=1}{\overset{N}{}}\left[\frac{A}{q_i}\frac{B}{p_i}\frac{A}{p_i}\frac{B}{q_i}\right],A,B𝒜$$
(18)
c) From the expansion (17) and the definition of $`V_S`$, we conclude that:

$$V_S(\widehat{A}^{})=\left[V_S(\widehat{A})\right]^{}A^{}.$$
(19)
d) Since the two basis $`\widehat{}_+`$ and $``$ have the same number of elements, the map $`V_S`$ is bijective and univocous.
e) From property a), we see that $`A=V_S(\widehat{A})`$ is the appropriate classical observable to be used in the expansion (4) of section 2. In that case the expansion (4) is exactly valid. Consequently, all the results of section 2 concerning the consistency between the classical and the quantum description of the time evolution of a general observable $`\widehat{A}`$ become exactly valid.
f) In general $`V_S(\widehat{A}\widehat{B})V_S(\widehat{A})V_S(\widehat{B})`$ and $`V_S\left([\widehat{A},\widehat{B}]\right)i\mathrm{}\{V_S(\widehat{A}),V_S(\widehat{B})\}`$. Let us then define a new product and a new bracket in $`𝒜`$:

Definition 3 \- The product $``$ and the bracket $`[,]_M`$
The new product is the map:

$$:𝒜\times 𝒜𝒜;V_S(\widehat{A})V_S(\widehat{B})=V_S(\widehat{A}\widehat{B}),\widehat{A},\widehat{B}\widehat{𝒜}.$$
(20)
Using this product we can define the new classical bracket:

$$[,]_M:𝒜\times 𝒜𝒜;[A,B]_M=ABBA,$$
(21)
and it is straightforward to check that the new bracket satisfies the identity: $`[V_S(A),V_S(B)]_M=V_S\left([\widehat{A},\widehat{B}]\right)`$.

The aim of the next section is to derive the explicit formula of the product $`V_S(\widehat{A}\widehat{B})`$ and of the commutator $`V_S([\widehat{A},\widehat{B}])`$ and, in the sequel, study their properties. We will see that the product $``$ is well defined: $`(𝒜,+,)`$ is a ring and the bracket $`[,]_M`$ is a true Lie bracket. We can thus anticipate the last property of the symmetric dequantization map:
g) The dequantization map $`V_S`$ is an isomorphism between the Lie algebras $`(\widehat{𝒜},,[,])`$ and $`(𝒜,,[,]_M)`$.

## 4 Dynamical structure of Symmetric Classical Mechanics

The purpose of this section is thus to derive an explicit formula for the dequantization of the product $`V_S(\widehat{A}\widehat{B})`$ of two operators $`\widehat{A},\widehat{B}\widehat{𝒜}`$ and, as a by-product, of the commutator $`V_S([\widehat{A},\widehat{B}])`$. This will allow us to establish the canonical structure of symmetric classical mechanics and therefore to make predictions about the evolution of an arbitrary classical system without having to refer to its quantum formulation.

### 4.1 The product $``$

First of all, notice that performing a symmetrization in the sense of section 3, coincides with the procedure of normal ordering bosonic fields by applying Wick’s theorem, providing we define the ”propagator”:

$$<\widehat{p}_i\widehat{q}_j>=<\widehat{q}_j\widehat{p}_i>\frac{1}{2}[\widehat{p}_i,\widehat{q}_j]=i\frac{\mathrm{}}{2}\delta _{ij}.$$
(22)
The following example illustrates this method:

$$\begin{array}{c}\widehat{O}_i\left(\widehat{O}_j\widehat{O}_k\right)_+=\left(\widehat{O}_i\widehat{O}_j\widehat{O}_k\right)_++<\widehat{O}_i\widehat{O}_j>\widehat{O}_k+<\widehat{O}_i\widehat{O}_k>\widehat{O}_j=\\ \\ =\left(\widehat{O}_i\widehat{O}_j\widehat{O}_k\right)_++\frac{1}{2}[\widehat{O}_i,\widehat{O}_j]\widehat{O}_k+\frac{1}{2}[\widehat{O}_i,\widehat{O}_k]\widehat{O}_j,\end{array}$$

where $`\left(\widehat{O}_i\widehat{O}_j\widehat{O}_k\right)_+\frac{1}{3!}\left(\widehat{O}_i\widehat{O}_j\widehat{O}_k+\text{permutations}\right)`$. We stress that this identity only holds, because $`[\widehat{O}_i,\widehat{O}_j]`$ is a c-number.

Let us now try to obtain $`V_S(\widehat{A}\widehat{B})`$ and $`V_S([\widehat{A},\widehat{B}])`$ for generic operators $`\widehat{A},\widehat{B}\widehat{𝒜}`$, given $`A=V_S(\widehat{A})`$, $`B=V_S(\widehat{B})`$. If we assume that $`\widehat{A}`$ and $`\widehat{B}`$ are already completely symmetrized, then we get (cf.(4)):

$$\{\begin{array}{c}\widehat{A}=_{n=0}^{\mathrm{}}\frac{1}{n!}_{1i_1,\mathrm{},i_n2N}\frac{^nA}{O_{i_1}\mathrm{}O_{i_n}}\left(\widehat{M}_{i_1}\mathrm{}\widehat{M}_{i_n}\right)_+\hfill \\ \\ \widehat{B}=_{m=0}^{\mathrm{}}\frac{1}{m!}_{1j_1,\mathrm{},j_m2N}\frac{^mB}{O_{j_1}\mathrm{}O_{j_m}}\left(\widehat{M}_{j_1}\mathrm{}\widehat{M}_{j_m}\right)_+,\hfill \end{array}$$
(23)
where the monomials $`\widehat{M}_i`$ are defined by: $`\widehat{M}_i\widehat{O}_iO_i`$.

The subtlety resides in noticing that in general $`(\widehat{A}\widehat{B})_+1/2(\widehat{A}\widehat{B}+\widehat{B}\widehat{A})`$. So the whole problem reduces to symmetrizing $`\widehat{A}\widehat{B}`$ properly. If we carry out the product of the two expansions (23), we shall have to dequantize terms of the form:

$$V_S\left((\widehat{M}_{i_1}\mathrm{}\widehat{M}_{i_n})_+(\widehat{M}_{j_1}\mathrm{}\widehat{M}_{j_m})_+\right).$$
(24)
Using Wick’s theorem we have:

$$\begin{array}{c}(\widehat{M}_{i_1}\mathrm{}\widehat{M}_{i_n})_+(\widehat{M}_{j_1}\mathrm{}\widehat{M}_{j_m})_+=\left(\widehat{M}_{i_1}\mathrm{}\widehat{M}_{i_n}\widehat{M}_{j_1}\mathrm{}\widehat{M}_{j_m}\right)_++\text{terms with one contraction}+\\ \\ +\text{terms with two contractions}+\mathrm{}+\text{terms with }min\{n,m\}\text{ contractions}.\end{array}$$
(25)
On the other hand,

$$\begin{array}{c}V_S\left((\widehat{M}_{i_1}\mathrm{}\widehat{M}_{i_k})_+\right)=V_S(\widehat{M}_{i_1})\mathrm{}V_S(\widehat{M}_{i_k})=V_S(\widehat{O}_{i_1}O_{i_1})\mathrm{}V_S(\widehat{O}_{i_k}O_{i_k})=\\ \\ =(O_{i_1}O_{i_1})\mathrm{}(O_{i_k}O_{i_k})=0\end{array}$$

Consequently, if $`nm`$ then the term (24), (25) will yield a vanishing contribution to $`V_S(\widehat{A}\widehat{B})`$. We are left with:

$$\begin{array}{c}V_S(\widehat{A}\widehat{B})=_{n=0}^{\mathrm{}}\frac{1}{(n!)^2}_{1i_1,\mathrm{},i_n2N}_{1j_1,\mathrm{},j_n2N}\frac{^nA}{O_{i_1}\mathrm{}O_{i_n}}\frac{^nB}{O_{j_1}\mathrm{}O_{j_n}}\times \\ \\ \times V_S[<\widehat{M}_{i_1}\widehat{M}_{j_1}><\widehat{M}_{i_2}\widehat{M}_{j_2}>\mathrm{}<\widehat{M}_{i_n}\widehat{M}_{j_n}>+\\ \\ +<\widehat{M}_{i_1}\widehat{M}_{j_2}><\widehat{M}_{i_2}\widehat{M}_{j_1}>\mathrm{}<\widehat{M}_{i_n}\widehat{M}_{j_n}>+\text{permutations}],\end{array}$$

where the expression inside the bracket includes all the terms with $`n`$ contractions. Since the derivative $`(^nB)/(O_{j_1}\mathrm{}O_{j_n})`$ is symmetric with respect to swapping any two indices, we conclude that all the terms yield the same contribution. There are $`n!`$ permutations of the $`j`$ indices. We hence get:

$$\begin{array}{c}V_S(\widehat{A}\widehat{B})=_{n=0}^{\mathrm{}}\frac{1}{n!}_{1i_1,\mathrm{},i_n2N}_{1j_1,\mathrm{},j_n2N}\frac{^nA}{O_{i_1}\mathrm{}O_{i_n}}\frac{^nB}{O_{j_1}\mathrm{}O_{j_n}}\times \\ \\ \times V_S\left(\frac{1}{2^n}[\widehat{M}_{i_1},\widehat{M}_{j_1}][\widehat{M}_{i_2},\widehat{M}_{j_2}]\mathrm{}[\widehat{M}_{i_n},\widehat{M}_{j_n}]\right).\end{array}$$
(26)
Notice that $`V_S\left([\widehat{M}_i,\widehat{M}_j]\right)=V_S\left([\widehat{O}_iO_i,\widehat{O}_jO_j]\right)=i\mathrm{}\{O_i,O_j\}`$. Let us now define the derivative $`\stackrel{}{}`$ which obeys the antisymmetric Leibnitz rule:

$$\begin{array}{cc}\stackrel{}{}(AB)=\hfill & (A)BAB,\hfill \\ \stackrel{}{}\{A,B\}=\hfill & \{A,B\}\{A,B\}.\hfill \end{array}$$
(27)
We equally define the following ”Liouvillian” operator;

$$\widehat{}\frac{1}{2}\underset{i=1}{\overset{N}{}}\left(\frac{}{p_i}\frac{\stackrel{}{}}{q_i}\frac{}{q_i}\frac{\stackrel{}{}}{p_i}\right).$$
(28)
We represent eq.(26) in the form,

$$V_S(\widehat{A}\widehat{B})=\underset{n=0}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}_n.$$
(29)
Let us now prove by induction that:

Lemma

$$_n\frac{1}{n!}\left(\frac{i\mathrm{}}{2}\right)^n\widehat{}^nAB.$$
(30)
Proof:

From (26) we get $`_0=AB`$ and

$$_1=\frac{i\mathrm{}}{2}\underset{i,j=1}{\overset{2N}{}}\frac{A}{O_i}\frac{B}{O_j}\{O_i,O_j\}=\frac{i\mathrm{}}{2}\underset{i=1}{\overset{N}{}}\left(\frac{A}{q_i}\frac{B}{p_i}\frac{A}{p_i}\frac{B}{q_i}\right)=\frac{i\mathrm{}}{2}\{A,B\}.$$

It is easy to check that:

$$\{A,B\}=\widehat{}AB.$$
(31)
And so $`_1=i\mathrm{}/2\widehat{}AB`$, in agreement with (29), (30).

Let us now assume that (30) holds for some $`n`$. We then have from (26):

$$\begin{array}{c}_{n+1}=\frac{1}{(n+1)!}_{1i_1,\mathrm{},i_{n+1}2N}_{1j_1,\mathrm{},j_{n+1}2N}\left(\frac{i\mathrm{}}{2}\right)^{n+1}\frac{^{n+1}A}{O_{i_1}\mathrm{}O_{i_{n+1}}}\times \\ \\ \times \frac{^{n+1}B}{O_{j_1}\mathrm{}O_{j_{n+1}}}\times \{O_{i_1},O_{j_1}\}\mathrm{}\{O_{i_{n+1}},O_{j_{n+1}}\}=\\ \\ =\frac{1}{(n+1)!}\left(\frac{i\mathrm{}}{2}\right)^{n+1}_{1i_1,\mathrm{},i_n2N}_{1j_1,\mathrm{},j_n2N}\{O_{i_1},O_{j_1}\}\mathrm{}\{O_{i_n},O_{j_n}\}\times \\ \\ \times \{\frac{^nA}{O_{i_1}\mathrm{}O_{i_n}},\frac{^nB}{O_{j_1}\mathrm{}O_{j_n}}\}=\\ \\ =\frac{1}{(n+1)!}\left(\frac{i\mathrm{}}{2}\right)^{n+1}_{1i_1,\mathrm{},i_n2N}_{1j_1,\mathrm{},j_n2N}\{O_{i_1},O_{j_1}\}\mathrm{}\{O_{i_n},O_{j_n}\}\times \\ \\ \times \left[\widehat{}\left(\frac{^nA}{O_{i_1}\mathrm{}O_{i_n}}\frac{^nB}{O_{j_1}\mathrm{}O_{j_n}}\right)\right].\end{array}$$

In the last step we used (31). Since $`\{O_i,O_j\}`$ are c-numbers, they commute with the operator $`\widehat{}`$, and we get:

$$\begin{array}{c}_{n+1}=\frac{1}{n+1}\frac{i\mathrm{}}{2}\widehat{}[\frac{1}{n!}\left(\frac{i\mathrm{}}{2}\right)^n_{1i_1,\mathrm{},i_n2N}_{1j_1,\mathrm{},j_n2N}\\ \\ \{O_{i_1},O_{j_1}\}\mathrm{}\{O_{i_n},O_{j_n}\}\times \frac{^nA}{O_{i_1}\mathrm{}O_{i_n}}\frac{^nB}{O_{j_1}\mathrm{}O_{j_n}}]=\\ \\ =\frac{1}{n+1}\frac{i\mathrm{}}{2}\widehat{}\left[_n\right]=\frac{1}{(n+1)!}\left(\frac{i\mathrm{}}{2}\right)^{n+1}\widehat{}^{n+1}AB,\end{array}$$

in agreement with (30). In summary, we proved the following theorem:

Theorem 1: Let $`\widehat{A},\widehat{B}\widehat{𝒜}`$ and $`A=V_S(\widehat{A}),B=V_S(\widehat{B})`$. The dequantization of the product $`\widehat{A}\widehat{B}`$ is given by:

$$V_S(\widehat{A}\widehat{B})AB=\mathrm{exp}\left(\frac{i\mathrm{}}{2}\widehat{}\right)AB.$$
(32)
This product is more commonly found in the form:

$$AB=A\mathrm{exp}\left(\frac{i\mathrm{}}{2}\widehat{𝒥}\right)B,$$
(33)
where $`\widehat{𝒥}`$ is the Janus operator:

$$\widehat{𝒥}\underset{i=1}{\overset{N}{}}\left(\frac{\stackrel{}{}}{q_i}\frac{\stackrel{}{}}{p_i}\frac{\stackrel{}{}}{p_i}\frac{\stackrel{}{}}{q_i}\right).$$
(34)
This product has the following properties for ($`A,B,C𝒜;`$ $`a,b𝒞)`$:

$$\begin{array}{cc}1)\hfill & \text{Linearity: }(aA+bB)C=a(AC)+b(BC),\hfill \\ 2)\hfill & A_{\mathrm{}}B=B_{\mathrm{}}A,\hfill \\ 3)\hfill & \text{Associativity: }(AB)C=A(BC),\hfill \\ 4)\hfill & \text{Identity: }A1=1A=A,\hfill \\ 5)\hfill & p_ip_j=p_ip_j;q_iq_j=q_iq_j;q_ip_j=q_ip_j+\frac{i\mathrm{}}{2}\delta _{ij}\hfill \\ 6)\hfill & (AB)^{}=B^{}A^{}\hfill \end{array}$$
(35)
Property 2) means that changing the order of the variables $`A`$, $`B`$ is tantamount to performing the substitution $`\mathrm{}\mathrm{}`$ in formula (33). This can be proved immediately by substituting the identity:

$$B\widehat{𝒥}^nA=(1)^nA\widehat{𝒥}^nB,$$
(36)
in equation (30). Property 3) is a trivial consequence of dequantizing the product of three operators. The remaining properties are straightforward to prove using the formula (33).

### 4.2 The bracket $`[,]_M`$

Theorem 2: The classical bracket $`[A,B]_MV_S([\widehat{A},\widehat{B}])`$ is given by:

$$[A,B]_M=2iA\mathrm{sin}\left(\frac{\mathrm{}}{2}\widehat{𝒥}\right)B,$$
(37)
for any $`\widehat{A},\widehat{B}\widehat{𝒜}`$ and $`A=V_S(\widehat{A})`$, $`B=V_S(\widehat{B})`$.

Proof:

$$\begin{array}{c}[A,B]_MV_S([\widehat{A},\widehat{B}])=V_S(\widehat{A}\widehat{B})V_S(\widehat{B}\widehat{A})=ABBA=A\left(e^{\frac{i\mathrm{}}{2}\widehat{𝒥}}e^{\frac{i\mathrm{}}{2}\widehat{𝒥}}\right)B=\\ \\ =_{n=0}^{\mathrm{}}\frac{1}{n!}\left(\frac{i\mathrm{}}{2}\right)^n\left[1(1)^n\right]A\widehat{𝒥}^nB=2iA\mathrm{sin}\left(\frac{\mathrm{}}{2}\widehat{𝒥}\right)B,\end{array}$$

where we used eq.(21) and property 2) in eq.(33). This expression is the celebrated Moyal bracket, . This formula might appear awkward at first sight. One would expect $`V_S([\widehat{A},\widehat{B}])=i\mathrm{}\{A,B\}`$. To order $`\mathrm{}`$, we have:

$$\begin{array}{cc}V_S(\widehat{A}\widehat{B})=\hfill & A\left(1+\frac{i\mathrm{}}{2}\widehat{𝒥}+𝒪(\mathrm{}^2)\right)B=AB+\frac{i\mathrm{}}{2}\{A,B\}+𝒪(\mathrm{}^2),\hfill \\ & \\ V_S([\widehat{A},\widehat{B}])=\hfill & 2iA\left(\frac{\mathrm{}}{2}\widehat{𝒥}+𝒪(\mathrm{}^3)\right)B=i\mathrm{}\{A,B\}+𝒪(\mathrm{}^3).\hfill \end{array}$$
(38)
To this order we do indeed recover the Poisson bracket. The Moyal bracket has the following properties for $`A,B,C𝒜`$; $`a,b𝒞`$:

$$\begin{array}{cc}1)\hfill & \text{Linearity: }[aA+bB,C]_M=a[A,C]_M+b[B,C]_M,\hfill \\ 2)\hfill & \text{Antisymmetry: }[B,A]_M=[A,B]_M,\hfill \\ 3)\hfill & \text{Jacobi identity: }[[A,B]_M,C]_M+[[B,C]_M,A]_M+[[C,A]_M,B]_M=0,\hfill \\ 4)\hfill & \text{Product (Leibnitz) rule: }[AB,C]_M=A[B,C]_M+[A,C]_MB,\hfill \\ 5)\hfill & \text{Structure constants :}[q_i,q_j]_M=[p_i,p_j]_M=0;[q_i,p_j]_M=i\mathrm{}\delta _{ij}.\hfill \end{array}$$
(39)
All these results follow immediately from the properties (35) of the product $``$ and from (21).

### 4.3 Dynamical Evolution

The time evolution of a quantum operator $`\widehat{A}(t)`$ is given by:

$$\widehat{A}(t)=\underset{n=0}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}\frac{1}{n!}\left(\frac{it}{\mathrm{}}\right)^n[\widehat{H},[\widehat{H},[\mathrm{},[\widehat{H},\widehat{A}]\mathrm{}]]],$$
(40)
where $`\widehat{H}`$ is the Hamiltonian. If $`V_S(\widehat{H})=H`$, then the previous equation yields upon dequantization:

$$A(t)=\underset{n=0}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}\frac{1}{n!}\left(\frac{it}{\mathrm{}}\right)^n[H,[H,[\mathrm{},[H,A]_M\mathrm{}]_M]_M]_M,$$
(41)
As a consequence of (41), the observable $`A`$ obeys the differential equation:

$$\dot{A}(t)=\frac{i}{\mathrm{}}[H,A(t)]_M.$$
(42)
Notice that this equation could also be obtained by dequantizing the original quantum dynamical equation for the observable $`\widehat{A}(t)`$. In particular we have:

$$\{\begin{array}{cc}\dot{q}_i(t)=\frac{H}{p_i}\hfill & \\ & \hfill i=1,\mathrm{},N.\\ \dot{p}_i(t)=\frac{H}{q_i}\hfill & \end{array}$$
(43)
Notice that these equations look exactly like the ones in traditional classical mechanics (i.e. with Poisson brackets). However, this similarity is misleading. Indeed, $`H`$ does not look exactly like the traditional classical Hamiltonian. Rather, all products of variables are replaced by the product $``$.

Let us now study some of the properties of the new theory:
1) Time evolution is generated by an unitary transformation. From the quantum theory, we have:

$$\{\begin{array}{c}\widehat{A}(t)=\widehat{U}(t)^1\widehat{A}(0)\widehat{U}(t),\hfill \\ \\ i\mathrm{}\frac{\widehat{U}}{t}=\widehat{H}\widehat{U},\widehat{U}(0)=1.\hfill \end{array}$$
(44)
Applying the map $`V_S`$:

$$\{\begin{array}{c}A(t)=U(t)^1A(0)U(t),\hfill \\ \\ i\mathrm{}\frac{U}{t}=HU,U(0)=1,\hfill \end{array}$$
(45)
where we used the fact that $`V_S(\widehat{U}^1\widehat{U})=V_S(U^1)V_S(\widehat{U})=1`$, and therefore $`V_S(\widehat{U}^1)=V_S(\widehat{U})^1`$.

Moreover, the classical quantity $`U(t)`$ is unitary in the sense that $`U^1=U^{}`$ ($`\widehat{U}^1=\widehat{U}^{}V_S(\widehat{U}^1)=V_S(\widehat{U}^{})V_S(\widehat{U})^1=V_S(\widehat{U})^{}`$) and thus $`U^{}U=1`$.

Substituting (45) into (42), we can verify explicitly that it provides a solution to the equations of motion.
2) All unitary transformations generate canonical transformations. In fact:

$$\begin{array}{c}U^1[A,B]_MU=U^1ABUU^1BAU=\\ \\ =U^1AUU^1BUU^1BUU^1AU=\\ \\ =[U^1AU,U^1BU]_M,\end{array}$$
(46)
and so the bracket structure is preserved under the action of $`U`$. In particular, time evolution is a canonical transformation.
3) The limit $`\mathrm{}0`$ of symmetric classical mechanics is standard classical mechanics. Indeed, the identities,

$$\{\begin{array}{cc}lim_\mathrm{}0AB=AB,\hfill & \\ & \hfill A,B𝒜\\ lim_\mathrm{}0\frac{1}{i\mathrm{}}[A,B]_M=\{A,B\},\hfill & \end{array}$$
(47)
can be checked immediately from the expansions (38). Using these limits in eqs.(41) and (42), we recover the standard version of classical mechanics.
4) Symmetric classical mechanics fully validates the use of expansion (4). In fact, if $`A(0)=V_S\left(\widehat{A}(0)\right))`$, then $`A(t)`$ (obtained by solving (42)) is given by $`V_S\left(\widehat{A}(t)\right)`$. Therefore expansion (4) is exactly valid for $`\widehat{A}(t)A(t)`$, where $`A(t)`$ is the prediction of symmetric classical mechanics for the time evolution of the observable $`A(0)`$, and thus all the results concerning the consistency between the classical and quantum predictions are exactly valid if the classical predictions are those of symmetric classical mechanics.

### 4.4 Symmetric Quantization

Finally, we shall define a quantization prescription for symmetric classical systems:

Definition 4: Symmetric Quantization
The symmetric quantization map $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_S:𝒜\widehat{𝒜}`$ is the Lie algebra isomorphism defined by the following rules:
1) $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_S`$ is linear,
2) $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_S(AB)=\mathrm{\Lambda }_S(A)\mathrm{\Lambda }_S(B).`$
It satisfies the following properties:
1) $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_S`$ maps the identity to the identity:

$$\mathrm{\Lambda }_S(A)=\mathrm{\Lambda }_S(A1)=\mathrm{\Lambda }_S(A)\mathrm{\Lambda }_S(1)\mathrm{\Lambda }_S(1)=1.$$

2) It is the inverse map of $`V_S`$:

$$\mathrm{\Lambda }_S\left(O_{i_1}O_{i_2}\mathrm{}O_{i_k}\right)=\mathrm{\Lambda }_S\left((O_{i_1}O_{i_2}\mathrm{}O_{i_k})_+\right)=\left(\mathrm{\Lambda }_S(O_{i_1})\mathrm{\Lambda }_S(O_{i_2})\mathrm{}\mathrm{\Lambda }_S(O_{i_k})\right)_+$$

where in the last step we used rule 2) from the definition. The previous identity together with property 1) proves that $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_SV_S=1`$.
3) A trivial consequence of rule 2) is the following:

$$\mathrm{\Lambda }_S\left([A,B]_M\right)=[\mathrm{\Lambda }_S(A),\mathrm{\Lambda }_S(B)].$$

## 5 Conclusions

In this paper we presented an alternative formulation of classical physics. The new theory was named symmetric classical mechanics. Its properties were studied thoroughly and, most important, it was shown that symmetric classical mechanics is the exact semiclassical limit of quantum mechanics for an arbitrary quantum system with a set of initial data satisfying the classicality criterion presented in section 2. In other words, the time evolution of a general quantum system is $`M`$-order consistent with the predictions of symmetric classical mechanics, provided the initial data for the two formulations are $`M`$-order classical. Notice that this property is not completely satisfied by standard classical mechanics.

Clearly, symmetric classical mechanics is not the only possible alternative framework for classical mechanics. The entire set of properties of the new theory and in particular its consistent canonical structure are a direct consequence of the definition of the dequantization map or, to go even further, of the choice of a basis for the algebra of quantum observables. Therefore, all the results presented in this paper can be reformulated for other dequantization maps, providing in this fashion other, possibly more interesting, descriptions of classical physics, .

The motivation to develop the theory of symmetric classical mechanics was threefold: 1) The first and most important motivation is theoretical. Symmetric classical mechanics provides a new perspective over the problem of the semiclassical limit of quantum mechanics. Firstly, because it proves that the semiclassical limit might be correctly described (and even more accurately) by another fully consistent dynamical structure and not just by classical mechanics. Secondly, because it clarifies the role of the limit $`\mathrm{}0`$ in deriving the semiclassical limit of quantum mechanics. Symmetric classical mechanics provides a description of the semiclassical limit in which no assumption is made about the magnitude of the Planck constant. Its validity rests exclusively upon a number of conditions that should be satisfied by the initial data wave function. In other words, symmetric classical mechanics would still provide a valid description of dynamics in a world with a huge Planck constant. As a side result we see that standard classical mechanics can be seen as a second limit of quantum mechanics when the set of initial data of the dynamical system satisfies some classicality conditions and the Planck constant can be regarded as being of neglectable magnitude. This result corroborates the argument and the results of . 2) On the other hand, symmetric classical mechanics is formulated in terms of the Moyal bracket and this bracket also provides the dynamics of the Moyal-Weyl-Wigner formulation of quantum mechanics. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that when compared to standard classical mechanics, symmetric classical mechanics displays a clearer relation with quantum mechanics. The quantization map from symmetric classical mechanics to quantum mechanics is one-to-one and there are thus no order problems in the quantization of a symmetric classical system. This property provides a new approach for the analysis of the order ambiguities in quantum mechanics. This analysis can now be enforced at the level of the original classical theory. 3) The last motivation concerns the problem of developing a consistent theory of coupled classical-quantum dynamics . We expect that the symmetric dequantization map might be consistently extended to the case where the purpose is to dequantize only one sector of the original quantum theory. If this is the case and if the extended dequantization map preserves the original set of properties, then it is trivial to obtain a consistent formulation (i.e. a true Lie bracket structure) of hybrid classical-quantum dynamics.

### Acknowledgments

We would like to thank João Marto for several suggestions made through the present work. This work was partially supported by the grants ESO/PRO/1258/98 and CERN/P/Fis/15190/1999.


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# Nonadiabatic noncyclic geometric phase and ensemble average spectrum of conductance in disordered mesoscopic rings with spin-orbit coupling

As is well known, the geometric phase  has manifested itself extensively in physics, particularly in mesoscopic systems where quantum interference is extremely important . Recently, Morpurgo et al  reported a novel splitting of the main peak (corresponding to the $`hc/e`$ Aharonov-Bohm (AB) oscillations) in the ensemble average Fourier spectrum of the conductance in open mesoscopic rings . The authors conjectured that the observed splitting is due to the spin-orbit(SO)-induced Berry’s phase . It is probably strong experimental evidence showing an important effect of the SO geometric phase on quantum transport. Although it was concluded that, in a mesoscopic ring possessing the time-reversal symmetry in the absence of AB-flux, the SO-dependent transport can be treated formally in the absence of SO-coupling but with an effective magnetic flux , it is unclear yet how to calculate the value of this flux as well as the ensemble average spectrum of conductance; besides, it is not clear either whether the above conclusion is still valid in the presence of an arbitrary local magnetic field on the ring(i.e., the aforementioned time-reversal symmetry is broken), which appears to be the experimental case in . Mal’shukov et al attempted to account for the observed splitting of the main peak, but were not quite successful . Three aspects of the experiment require theoretical explanation. First, the magnitude of the observed splitting is surprisingly large when compared with an estimation based on the adiabatic approximation in a clean mesoscopic ring. For a clean ring with radius $`r`$ subject to a crown-shaped effective magnetic field $`𝐁_{eff}=(B_0cos\phi _r,B_0sin\phi _r,B_z)`$ in the cyclindrical coordinates, Stern predicted that the inverse $`B_z`$ period becomes $`(\mathrm{\Delta }B_z)^1=\pi r^2/\varphi _0\pm 1/(2B_0)`$ at $`B_0>>B_z`$, and the splitting would be $`1.2\times 10^3mT^1`$ for an estimated experimental parameter $`B_00.8T`$, which is at least one order of magnitude less than the observed value. Secondly, the origin of the side structure on the main peak needs to be clarified. Lastly, most existing theoretical estimations are crucially based on the adiabatic or cyclic condition; however, neither adiabatic nor cyclic evolution is well satisfied in the experiment . In view of these facts, we believe that the nonadiabatic noncyclic geometric phase, essentially similar to the effective flux addressed formally in Ref. , could play a crucial role in the system, this is the key point of the present work, being essentially different from some existing theoretical analyses . However, it is still highly nontrival to evaluate the SO-induced geometric phase in the nonadiabatic noncyclic transport and its effect on the ensemble average spectrum.

It is worth pointing out that the relevant geometric phase detected in the experiment is likely induced by a $`U(1)\times SU(2)_{spin}`$ field. In exploring the global geometrical connotations of gauge fields of either the Abelian $`U(1)`$ type or the non-Abelian monopole type, Yang et al showed that the nonintegrable gauge phase factor in the wavefunction gives an intrinsic and complete description of the relevant field, hereafter refered to as Yang’s theory. In this Letter, we first generalize Yang’s theory to the non-Abelian $`U(1)\times SU(2)_{spin}`$ electromagnetic field. Using a simple one-dimensional(1D) continuum model for a quasi-1D mesoscopic ring, we then analyze carefully the nonintegrable phase induced by this field and evaluate its effect on the splitting of the main peak in the ensemble average spectrum of the conductance. Remarkably, we find that the splitting as well as the side structure of the main peak observed by Morpurgo et al stem from the nonadiabatic noncyclic geometric phase.

We consider an electron subject to an electromagnetic field. The corresponding Hamiltonian with $`U(1)_{em}\times SU(2)_{spin}`$ gauge symmetry is given by

$$\widehat{H}=\frac{1}{2m}(𝐩+\frac{e}{c}𝐀\frac{\mu }{c}𝐚)^2eA^0+\mu a^0+V(𝐫),$$
(1)
where $`\mu =g\mu _B/2`$ with $`g`$ the gyromagnetic ratio and $`\mu _B=e\mathrm{}/(2mc)`$ the Bohr magneton. Here $`A^\nu =(A^0,𝐀)`$ represents a $`U(1)_{em}`$ electromagnetic potential, and $`a^\nu =(a^0,𝐚)=(\stackrel{}{\sigma }𝐁,\stackrel{}{\sigma }\times 𝐄/2)`$ is an $`SU(2)_{spin}`$ potential with $`\stackrel{}{\sigma }`$ denoting the Pauli matrix. $`V(𝐫)`$ is an arbitrary spin-independent local potential at the point $`𝐫`$. The Schrödinger equation for the normalized two-component wave function $`\mathrm{\Psi }(x^\nu )`$ reads

$$i\mathrm{}\frac{}{t}\mathrm{\Psi }(x^\nu )=\widehat{H}\mathrm{\Psi }(x^\nu ).$$
(2)
By introducing a new wave function , $`\mathrm{\Psi }_0(x^\nu )=\widehat{U}\mathrm{\Psi }(x^\nu )`$, where

$$\widehat{U}=exp(i\frac{e}{\mathrm{}c}_\mathrm{\Gamma }A_\nu 𝑑x^\nu )\widehat{P}exp(i\frac{\mu }{\mathrm{}c}_\mathrm{\Gamma }a_\nu 𝑑x^\nu )$$
(3)
with $`\widehat{P}`$ the path ordering operator and $`\mathrm{\Gamma }`$ an integration curve from a fixed $`x_0^\nu `$ to $`x^\nu `$, we find that Eq.(2) reduces exactly to

$$i\mathrm{}\frac{}{t}\mathrm{\Psi }_0(x^\nu )=\widehat{H}_0\mathrm{\Psi }_0(x^\nu )$$
(4)
with

$$\widehat{H}_0=\widehat{U}(\widehat{H}i\mathrm{}\frac{}{t})\widehat{U}^1=\frac{(i\mathrm{})^2}{2m}+V(𝐫).$$
(5)
Clearly, $`\widehat{U}`$ is a continuous local gauge transformation. Under this gauge transformation, the Hamiltonian (1) is transformed to a Hamiltonian devoid of electromagnetic fields, but with a phase shift in the wave function as seen in Eq.(3). In this sense, the gauge factor in Eq. (3) is just the nonintegrable phase in Yang’s theory, which can describe completely the $`U(1)\times SU(2)_{spin}`$ electromagnetic field. For a mesoscopic ring where the phase memory is retained by electrons, we may conclude that physical properties of the system in the presence of an electromagnetic field can be expressed in terms of the same quantity in the absence of the electromagnetic field, but with a nonintegrable phase being taken into account. An important application is related to the SO coupling: any spin-independent transport quantity can be expressed in terms of the same quantity in the absence of SO scattering but with an effective magnetic flux, a fact which was shown directly by using the transfer matrix method in a tight-binding form for a mesoscopic ring possessing the time-reversal symmetry in the absence of AB-flux  . In fact, with the help of this generalized theory, we are able to study a disordered mesoscopic system subject to an electromagnetic field in a simpler way.

We now focus on the phase factor first. To capture essential physics of geometric phase in the present quasi-1D system, we employ a simple 1D model. For a closed path parameterized by arc length $`s`$, the total phase factor in Eq.(3) is $`\gamma _t=\gamma _{AB}+\stackrel{~}{\gamma }`$, where $`\gamma _{AB}=2\pi \varphi /\varphi _0`$ is the usual AB phase with $`\varphi `$ the magnetic flux and $`\varphi _0=hc/e`$, and $`\stackrel{~}{\gamma }`$ is the second phase factor in Eq.(3), which is determined by a Schrödinger-type equation

$$i\mathrm{}\frac{}{s}|\xi (s)=\mu \stackrel{}{\sigma }(\frac{1}{v}𝐁\frac{1}{2c}\widehat{𝐯}\times 𝐄)|\xi (s).$$
(6)
Here $`\widehat{𝐯}`$ is a unit vector along the direction of the velocity $`𝐯=v\widehat{𝐯}`$ and $`ds=vdt`$. Equation (6) describes the evolution of the spin state $`|\xi `$ governed by the operator $`\widehat{U}`$. The phase associated with Eq.(6) can be further written as $`\stackrel{~}{\gamma }=\gamma _d+\gamma _{AB}^{eff}+\gamma _p`$  with the dynamical phase

$$\gamma _d=\frac{\mu }{\mathrm{}}\xi (s)|\stackrel{}{\sigma }\frac{1}{v}𝐁|\xi (s)ds,$$
(7)
the effective AB phase

$$\gamma _{AB}^{eff}=\frac{\mu }{\mathrm{}}\xi (s)|\frac{1}{2c}\stackrel{}{\sigma }(\widehat{𝐯}\times 𝐄)|\xi (s)ds,$$
(8)
and $`\gamma _p`$ is the Pancharatnam phase, to be addressed in detail later. Here we emphasize that $`\gamma _{AB}^{eff}`$ is a kind of geometric phase, though it seems from Eq.(8) as if it were a dynamical phase related to an ‘effective magnetic field’ $`𝐯\times 𝐄/2c`$. The reason lies in the fact that the two waves propagating in opposite directions in the ring acquire phases with the opposite sign for $`\gamma _{AB}^{eff}`$ (simply because it depends on the velocity direction $`\widehat{𝐯}`$), but the same sign for $`\gamma _d`$ . The geometrical feature of $`\gamma _{AB}^{eff}`$ seems to be ignored in some earlier analyses , which appears to be a minor reason for the existing discrepancy between theory and experiment. In fact, $`\gamma _{AB}^{eff}`$ is just induced by an $`SU(2)_{spin}`$ vector potential $`𝐚`$, and it is clear from Eq.(1) that $`𝐚`$ plays a role similar to that of the $`U(1)_{em}`$ vector potential $`𝐀`$ in the AB effect. As a result, it is expected that an effective AB effect can be induced by this $`SU(2)_{spin}`$ vector potential , as was also shown by Choi et al .

For a unit vector $`𝐧=(n_1,n_2,n_3)=(sin\theta cos\phi ,sin\theta sin\phi ,cos\theta )`$ with $`𝐧`$ a unit sphere $`S^2`$, each $`𝐧`$ corresponds to the spin state $`|\xi =(e^{i\phi /2}cos(\theta /2),e^{i\phi /2}sin(\theta /2))^T`$ via the relation $`𝐧=\xi |\stackrel{}{\sigma }|\xi `$, where $`T`$ represents matrix transposition. The noncyclic Pancharatnam phase accumulated in an evolution of $`𝐧`$ is found to be

$$\gamma _p=\frac{1}{2}_{\mathrm{\Sigma }=C}𝐧𝑑𝚺,$$
(9)
where $`d𝚺`$ is an area element on $`S^2`$, $`C`$ is a specific closed curve on $`S^2`$, which is along the actual path of $`𝐧(s)`$ plus the shorter geodesic curve from the final point $`𝐧(s_f)=(sin\theta _fcos\phi _f,sin\theta _fsin\phi _f,cos\theta _f)`$ to the initial point $`𝐧(0)=(sin\theta _icos\phi _i,sin\theta _isin\phi _i,cos\theta _i)`$. This Pancharatnam phase can be derived as

$$\gamma _p=\frac{1}{2}_0^{t_f}\frac{n_1\dot{n}_2n_2\dot{n}_1}{1+n_3}𝑑t+arctg\frac{sin(\phi _f\phi _i)}{ctg\frac{\theta _f}{2}ctg\frac{\theta _i}{2}+cos(\phi _f\phi _i)},$$
(10)
where $`t_f`$ is the final time, and $`𝐧`$ is determined by the equation

$$\frac{d𝐧}{dt}=\frac{2\mu }{\mathrm{}}(𝐁\frac{1}{2c}𝐯\times 𝐄)\times 𝐧,$$
(11)
which represents a spin-$`\frac{1}{2}`$ particle moving in an effective magnetic field $`(𝐁𝐯\times 𝐄/2c)`$. This phase is not equal to the cyclic Aharonov-Anandan (AA) phase in general , but recovers the AA phase $`\gamma _{AA}=\frac{1}{2}_0^\tau 𝑑t(n_1\dot{n}_2n_2\dot{n}_1)/(1+n_3)`$ for any cyclic evolution with the period $`\tau `$ . It is remarkable that the nonintegrable phase in Eq.(3) can be evaluated by simply computing Eqs.(7), (8), and (10); while it is hard to calculate the value of the effective flux addressed formally in Ref. , particularly in the presence of an arbitrary local magnetic field.

At this stage, as in the experiment , we study a disordered ring with the Rashba SO-interaction(equivalent to an internal electric field $`𝐄=E𝐞_z`$), subject to a local magnetic field $`𝐁=B_z𝐞_z`$ and a magnetic flux $`\varphi =\pi r^2B_z`$. The Hamiltonian, which is in the form of Eq.(1), becomes

$$\widehat{H}=\mathrm{}\omega _r[i\frac{}{\phi _r}+\frac{\varphi }{\varphi _0}\frac{\eta }{2}(\sigma _xcos\phi _r+\sigma _ysin\phi _r)]^2\mu B_z\sigma _z+V(\phi _r),$$
(12)
where $`\omega _r=\mathrm{}/(2mr^2)`$, $`\phi _r`$ is the polar angle, and the normalized electric field strength $`\eta =\mu _BEr/c\mathrm{}=2m\kappa r`$ with the SO coefficient $`\mathrm{}^2\kappa `$.

To account for the experimental results naturally, we investigate the electronic transmission across a disordered ring connected to external current leads, schematically illustrated in Fig.3 in Ref.. In such a system, the electronic transmission is significantly affected by the nonintegrable phase. Using the method originally proposed by Büttiker et al and our generalization of Yang’s theory, the transmission coefficient across the ring is found to be

$$T_g=\frac{ϵ^2}{b^4}\left|(ba,1)\stackrel{~}{T}_+[\frac{e^{i\mathrm{\Delta }\gamma }}{b^2}\left(\begin{array}{cc}(b^2a^2)& a\\ a& 1\end{array}\right)\stackrel{~}{T}_{}\left(\begin{array}{cc}(b^2a^2)& a\\ a& 1\end{array}\right)\stackrel{~}{T}_+\stackrel{~}{1}]^1\left(\begin{array}{c}ba\\ 1\end{array}\right)\right|^2,$$
(13)
where $`\stackrel{~}{T}_+`$ and $`\stackrel{~}{T}_{}`$ are the transfer matrices of the upper and lower branches of the ring, $`\stackrel{~}{1}`$ is the unit matrix, $`a=\pm (\sqrt{12ϵ}1)/2`$, and $`b=\pm (\sqrt{12ϵ}+1)/2`$ with $`0ϵ1/2`$. $`\mathrm{\Delta }\gamma =\gamma _{AB}+\gamma _{AB}^{eff}(𝐧(0))+\gamma _p(𝐧(0))`$ represents the nonadiabatic noncyclic geometrical phase accumulated in the evolution when electron(with the initial spin-state $`𝐧(0)`$) moves one cycle in the clockwise sense . For a beam of electron waves with Fermi wave vector $`k_f`$, the rate for electrons to traverse one round in the ring is $`\omega _f=\mathrm{}k_f/(mr)`$ for ballistic motion, but is estimated approximately to be $`\omega _d=l\omega _f/(2\pi r)`$ for weak diffusive motion , where $`l`$ is the electron mean free path. This rate can be regarded as the angular frequency of the otherwise rotating magnetic field felt by the electron spin , which is given by $`𝐁_{eff}(t)=(B_0^{f,d}cos\omega _{f,d}t,B_0^{f,d}sin\omega _{f,d}t,B_z)`$ with $`B_0^{f,d}=\eta \mathrm{}\omega _{f,d}/2\mu `$. Then from the equation $`d𝐧(t)/dt=(2\mu /\mathrm{})𝐁_{eff}(t)\times 𝐧(t)`$, $`𝐧(t)`$ is derived exactly as

$`𝐧^T(t)`$ $`=`$ $`\left(\begin{array}{ccc}cos\omega _{f,d}t\hfill & sin\omega _{f,d}t& \hfill 0\\ sin\omega _{f,d}t\hfill & cos\omega _{f,d}t& \hfill 0\\ 0\hfill & 0& \hfill 1\end{array}\right)`$ (17)
$`\times `$ $`\left(\begin{array}{ccc}sin^2\chi +cos^2\chi cos\omega _st\hfill & cos\chi sin\omega _st& \hfill \frac{1}{2}sin2\chi (1cos\omega _st)\\ cos\chi sin\omega _st\hfill & cos\omega _st& \hfill sin\chi sin\omega _st\\ \frac{1}{2}sin2\chi (1cos\omega _st)\hfill & sin\chi sin\omega _st& \hfill cos^2\chi +sin^2\chi cos\omega _st\end{array}\right)𝐧^T(0),`$ (21)
where $`\omega _s=\sqrt{\omega _0^2+(\omega _{f,d}+\omega _1)^2}`$ and $`\chi =arctg[\omega _0/(\omega _{f,d}+\omega _1)]`$ with $`\omega _0=2\mu B_0^{f,d}/\mathrm{}`$ and $`\omega _1=2\mu B_z/\mathrm{}`$. On the other hand, we can rewrite Eq.(8) clearly as

$$\gamma _{AB}^{eff}(𝐧(0))=\frac{\eta \omega _{f,d}}{2}_0^{2\pi /\omega _{f,d}}sin\theta cos(\omega _{f,d}t\phi )𝑑t$$
(22)
with $`\theta =arctg(\sqrt{n_1^2+n_2^2}/n_3)`$ and $`\phi =arctg(n_2/n_1)`$. Substituting Eq.(21) into Eqs.(10) and (22), the nonadiabatic noncyclic phases $`\gamma _{AB}^{eff}`$ and $`\gamma _p`$ can be computed, at least numerically.

For simplicity, but without loss of generality, we compute $`\stackrel{~}{T}_+`$ and $`\stackrel{~}{T}_{}`$ in a generalized Kronig-Penny ring consisting of $`N=N_++N_{}`$ uniformly spaced $`\delta `$function barriers with random strengths, where $`N_+`$ $`(N_{})`$ is the number of barriers on the upper (lower) branch. The Hamiltonian for the system in the absence of electromagnetic fields reads $`\widehat{H}_0=(\mathrm{}^2/2m)d^2/dx_\varsigma ^2+_{n_\varsigma =1}^{N_\varsigma }\lambda _{n_\varsigma }\delta (x_\varsigma n_\varsigma a_0)`$, where $`\lambda _{n_\varsigma }`$ is a potential strength parameter, $`a_0`$ is the lattice spacing, and $`\varsigma =+()`$ represents the upper (lower) branch. The spinless electron wave function in the regions where no potentials are present may be written as $`\psi _\varsigma (x_\varsigma )=A_{n_\varsigma }e^{ik_fx_\varsigma }+B_{n_\varsigma }e^{ik_fx_\varsigma }`$. The coefficients A$`_{n_\varsigma }`$ and B$`_{n_\varsigma }`$ across site $`x_\varsigma =n_\varsigma a_0`$ are related through the matrix $`\stackrel{~}{M}_{n_\varsigma }`$,

$$\left(\begin{array}{c}A_{\text{(n+1)}_\varsigma }\\ B_{\text{(n+}1\text{)}_\varsigma }\end{array}\right)=\stackrel{~}{M}_{n_\varsigma }\left(\begin{array}{c}A_{n_\varsigma }\\ B_{n_\varsigma }\end{array}\right)$$

with

$$\stackrel{~}{M}_{n_\varsigma }=\left(\begin{array}{cc}1\frac{iV_{n_\varsigma }}{2k_f}& \frac{iV_{n_\varsigma }}{2k_f}e^{2ik_fn_\varsigma a_0}\\ \frac{iV_{n_\varsigma }}{2k_f}e^{2ik_fn_\varsigma a_0}& 1+\frac{iV_{n_\varsigma }}{2k_f}\end{array}\right),$$

where $`V_{n_\varsigma }=2m\lambda _{n_\varsigma }/\mathrm{}^2`$ is assumed to be distributed uniformly in an interval $`[w/2,w/2]`$. Then, one can find

$$\stackrel{~}{T_\varsigma }=\left(\begin{array}{cc}e^{ik_fN_\varsigma a_0}& 0\\ 0& e^{ik_fN_\varsigma a_0}\end{array}\right)\underset{n_\varsigma =1}{\overset{N_\varsigma }{}}\stackrel{~}{M}_{n_\varsigma }.$$
(23)
Note that $`\stackrel{~}{T_\varsigma }`$ can be further simplified to a $`2\times 2`$ matrix . Substituting the simplified Eq.(23) and $`\mathrm{\Delta }\gamma `$ into Eq.(13), we are able to calculate the transmission coefficient $`T_g`$.

For comparison with the experimental observation, we plot in Fig.1 the calculated ensemble average Fourier spectrum of the conductance for unpolarized electrons , which is defined as

$$|G(\nu )|=|_{B_m}^{B_m}e^{i\nu B_z}G(B_z)𝑑B_z|,$$
(24)
where $`G(B_z)=(e^2/h)_{\pm 𝐧(0)}\overline{T}_g(B_z)`$ with $`\overline{T}_g`$ the average on the initial spin-orientation, $``$ represents the ensemble average. Reasonable parameters in the calculation are determined as follows. As in the experiment, $`B_m=0.35T`$, $`v_f3.0\times 10^5m/s`$, $`g14`$, $`r1.05\mu m`$ (with $`N_\varsigma =4200`$ and $`a_0\frac{\pi }{4}\times 10^9m`$), which leads to the period in a magnetic field $`1.2mT`$; $`w0.267k_f`$, which corresponds to the mean free path $`l=96k_f^2a_0/w^21.0\mu m`$ . The dimensionless coefficient $`\eta 3.5`$, which corresponds to the experimentally reported SO coefficient $`\mathrm{}^2\kappa 5.5\times 10^{10}eVcm`$. Finally, it is typical to consider the case $`ϵ=0.25`$. It is worth emphasizing that the essential feature of Fig.1 is sensitive mainly to the SO coupling parameter $`\eta `$: no clear splitting is present in the main peak if $`\eta `$ is smaller than about $`1.5`$. This implies that the SO-interaction plays a crucial role in the splitting. To clarify the origin of the structure of the main peak, we plot it under both adiabatic and nonadiabatic conditions. The former case is shown in the inset of Fig.1, where $`\gamma _p=\pi cos\theta _i(1cos\chi _a)`$ and $`\gamma _{AB}^{eff}=\eta \pi cos\theta _isin\chi _a`$ with $`\chi _a=arctg(B_0^d/B_z)`$. As $`(B_z/B_0^d)`$ is no longer small, it is very difficult to have a clear analytical understanding of the influences of $`\gamma _p`$ and $`\gamma _{AB}^{eff}`$ on the splitting of the peak. From the inset of Fig.1, we can see that under the adiabatic approximation a somewhat splitting of the main Fourier peak is present only if we include the effective AB phase; however, this splitting feature is obviously not in good agreement with the experimental result. After careful analysis, we understand that the effect of the adiabatic $`\gamma _p`$-phase is too weak to play an important role in causing clearly observable splitting. More remarkably, if ever we take into account both the Pancharatnam phase and the effective AB phase in the nonadiabatic noncyclic case, as shown by the solid line in the main panel of Fig.1, our theoretical result is in excellent agreement with the experimental observation, especially for the splitting and the side structure (two small peaks) of the main peak (see Fig.5 in Ref.). From Fig.1, we can also see that the Pancharatnam phase plays a key role in the main splitting, while the two small side-peaks are closely related to the effective AB phase. It is therefore clarified for the first time that the experimentally observed splitting of the main peak in the ensemble average Fourier spectrum stems from the nonadiabatic noncyclic Pancharatnam phase and the effective AB phase, both being dependent on the SO coupling.

Finally, we remark that the radius of the ring $``$ the mean free path ($`1\mu m`$) and the transport is in the weakly diffusive regime in the experiment. In the present quasi-1D ring, a multi-channel effect, albert weak and secondary, may exhibit in the ensemble average spectrum of the conductance (e.g., broadening and smearing of the peak splitting), which has been ignored in the present work and may deserve for further detailed study in future. Nevertheless, the effect would not affect the present conclusion regarding the splitting qualitatively because the non-adiabaticity of geometric phase is unlikely changed significantly in the present weak diffusive ring.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: zwang@hkucc.hku.hk

Figure Caption

Fig.1 The peak of the ensemble average Fourier spectrum of the conductance in nonadiabatic noncyclic cases. The inset shows the corresponding curves under the adiabatic condition.


text:
# Color Superconductivity in High Density Quark Matter

## 1 Introduction

In this article I review recent progress on color superconductivity in high density QCD. It is remarkable how much more we know about QCD at high density compared to just two years ago, in 1998. The ultimate fate of baryonic matter at high density is a fundamental property of QCD, with implications for the astrophysics of neutron stars, as well as heavy ion collisions. More generally, we would like someday to understand the QCD phase diagram (figure (1)) in all its complexity as a function of temperature, chemical potential and quark masses.

While lattice studies have been fundamental in determining the behavior of QCD at high temperature, technical difficulties arise in the application of Monte Carlo techniques once a chemical potential is introduced (essentially, the measure of integration is no longer positive definite, due to complex eigenvalues of the Dirac operator). The progress I describe does not rely on brute force techniques, but rather on physical insights associated with the presence of a Fermi surface. The special properties of physics near a Fermi surface are discussed in section 2. Remarkably, rigorous statements can be made in the limit of infinite density.

There are two qualitatively different regimes to be addressed. The regime most likely to be realized in nature (i.e. in the cores of neutron stars or in heavy ion collisions) is that of intermediate density, where the average distance between quarks is still of order a Fermi and the gluons exchanged are rather soft. This regime is strongly coupled, and while we can make qualitative statements about the nature of the ground state using renormalization group techniques, we cannot perform quantitative calculations. The intermediate density case is discussed in section 2.

At extremely high densities the effective coupling $`\alpha _s`$ is small, leading to a weakly coupled liquid of quarks. The only low energy excitations in this liquid are quasi-particles and quasi-holes representing fluctuations near the Fermi surface. There are rather general arguments (see below) which suggest that any attractive interaction, no matter how small, can lead to Cooper pairing in the presence of a Fermi surface. In the case of QCD, this attractive interaction is provided by gluon exchange in the $`\overline{3}`$ channel. Thus, we expect to find condensation of Cooper pairs of quarks in the high density limit.

Actually, even in the high density limit, there are some subtleties which make the problem less than straightforward. Most importantly, although the effective coupling is weak, the exchange of magnetic gluons leads to a long range interaction due to the absence of a magnetic screening mass. Quarks carry electric, rather than magnetic, color charge, and hence are better at screening the timelike component ($`A_0`$) of the gluon field than the spacelike ($`A_i`$). It is only non-perturbative effects which can screen color-magnetic fluctuations, and these are nearly absent at weak coupling. An understanding of dynamic screening due to Landau damping is necessary to control the high density calculations. These issues are discussed in section 4.

The order parameter for color superconductivity is

$$\psi ^TC\mathrm{\Gamma }\psi .$$
(1)
where C is the charge conjugation operator and $`\mathrm{\Gamma }`$ is a matrix in color, flavor and Dirac space. As we will see below, determining the precise form of $`\mathrm{\Gamma }`$ requires some work; it is particularly complicated in the case of three flavors. However, as we will discuss in section 5, in the weak coupling limit the true groundstate can be determined in a controlled approximation. Here we will simply note that single gluon exchange between two quark quasiparticles can be decomposed into an attractive $`\overline{3}`$ channel and a repulsive $`6`$ channel. Thus, at the most naive level we expect an anti-triplet condensate, which breaks $`\mathrm{SU}(3)\mathrm{SU}(2)`$. The main effect of this condensate is that it leads to the Higgs phenomena for at least some subset of the gluons, or equivalently to the Meissner effect and screening of some subset of the color magnetic fields. The phenomenological implications of color superconductivity are still not well understood and will be the subject of investigation for some time to come.

Let me close this introduction with a historical note. The idea that quark matter might be a color superconductor is quite old . The original insight was based on the existence of the attractive $`\overline{3}`$ channel and an analogy with ordinary superconductors. Recent interest in the problem was rekindled by the work of two groups that considered diquark condensation due to instanton-mediated interactions , predicting gaps as large as $`100`$ MeV. These calculations, while uncontrolled, are quite suggestive, and led to the recent progress on the subject. It is often claimed that early investigations predicted tiny gaps, at most of order a few MeV. While this may have been the consensus among the few theorists who had actually worked on the problem, it is actually an unfair characterization of Bailin and Love’s results . A value of the strong coupling large enough to justify the instanton liquid picture of  also yields a large gap when substituted in Bailin and Love’s results. After all, instantons are suppressed by an exponential factor $`\mathrm{exp}(2\pi /\alpha _s)`$. Bailin and Love merely suffered from the good taste not to extrapolate their results to large values of $`\alpha _s`$!

## 2 Physics Near a Fermi Surface and the Renormalization Group

Important simplifications arise in the study of cold, dense matter due to the existence of a Fermi surface, which in relativistic systems is likely to be rotationally invariant. The energy of a low-energy excitation (a quasi-particle or -hole) is then independent of the orientation of its momentum $`\stackrel{}{p}`$, and only depends on $`p\mu `$, where $`p=|\stackrel{}{p}|`$ and $`\mu `$ is the chemical potential or Fermi energy. (Here, for simplicity, we will always work with massless quarks.) This leads to a kind of dimensional reduction, so that physics near a Fermi surface is effectively 1+1 dimensional. In particular, arbitrarily weak interactions can lead to non-perturbative phenomena like pair formation.

The renormalization group approach  is particularly useful here – we integrate out the modes far from the Fermi surface, leaving only the low-energy quasi-particle and -hole states that are involved in the interesting physics. These excitations might in principle be related to the original quarks in a complicated way, but on quite general grounds must be described by an effective action of the form

$$S_{eff}=𝑑td^3p\psi ^{}\left(i_t(ϵ(p)ϵ_F)\right)\psi +S_{int},$$
(2)
where $`S_{int}`$ contains higher dimensional, local quasi-particle operators. Strictly speaking, this form of the effective action is only valid for models in which the original interactions were local (short ranged). While appropriate for QCD at intermediate densities , where non-perturbative effects are expected to generate screening of magnetic gluons, it must be modified at weak coupling where magnetic fluctuations are long ranged . However, it is the only technique I know of from which we can obtain robust information about the strongly coupled region of the phase diagram. Below I review the results of this analysis, and defer a discussion of the weak coupling phase until the following section.

It can be shown  using simple classical scaling arguments that all interactions are irrelevant except for the Cooper pairing interaction (scattering of quasi-particles at opposide sides of the Fermi surface: $`\stackrel{}{p}_1\stackrel{}{p}_2`$) and stricly colinear scattering: $`\stackrel{}{p}_1\stackrel{}{p}_2`$, which can lead to the Overhauser effect (chiral waves) at large-$`N_c`$ . Both of these interactions are classically marginal, so quantum corrections determine their evolution. Here we restrict ourselves to local Cooper pairing operators which are invariant under the full $`SU(3)_L\times SU(3)_R\times U(1)_A`$ chiral symmetry:

$`O_{LL}^0`$ $`=`$ $`(\overline{\psi }_L\gamma _0\psi _L)^2,O_{LR}^0=(\overline{\psi }_L\gamma _0\psi _L)(\overline{\psi }_R\gamma _0\psi _R)`$ (3)
$`O_{LL}^i`$ $`=`$ $`(\overline{\psi }_L\gamma _i\psi _L)^2,O_{LR}^i=(\overline{\psi }_L\stackrel{}{\gamma }\psi _L)(\overline{\psi }_R\stackrel{}{\gamma }\psi _R).`$
These come in both color symmetric ($`\overline{3}`$) and antisymmetric (sextet) combinations. More general operators with different flavor or Dirac structures can be reduced to linear combinations of the basic ones (3), using parity and Fierz rearrangements. This analysis can be extended to operators (such as those induced by instantons) that break the anomalous $`U(1)_A`$ symmetry , yielding a very robust characterization of QCD even at intermediate densities and strong coupling. We will not discuss the details of this more general analysis here, but the results (given reasonable assumptions about the signs and magnitudes of the interactions) are qualitatively similar

The RG evolution of the operators in (3) is determined by quark-quark scattering near the Fermi surface. A bubble graph with four-quark vertices $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_1`$ and $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_2`$ and external quark lines satisfying the Cooper pairing kinematics yields

$$G_1G_2I(\mathrm{\Gamma }_1)_{i^{}i}(\mathrm{\Gamma }_1)_{k^{}k}\left[(\gamma _0)_{ij}(\gamma _0)_{kl}+\frac{1}{3}(\stackrel{}{\gamma })_{ij}(\stackrel{}{\gamma })_{kl}\right](\mathrm{\Gamma }_2)_{jj^{}}(\mathrm{\Gamma }_2)_{ll^{}}$$
(4)
Here $`I=\frac{i}{8\pi ^2}\mu ^2\mathrm{log}(\mathrm{\Lambda }_{IR}/\mathrm{\Lambda }_{UV})`$, where $`[\mathrm{\Lambda }_{IR},\mathrm{\Lambda }_{UV}]`$ are the upper and lower cutoffs of the momentum shell integrated out. We define the density of states on the Fermi surface to be $`N=\mu ^2/(2\pi ^2)`$ (in weak coupling) and $`t\mathrm{log}(\mathrm{\Lambda }_{IR}/\mathrm{\Lambda }_{UV})`$. The RG flow does not mix $`LL`$ and $`LR`$ operators, nor different color channels. We obtain the following RG equations

$`{\displaystyle \frac{d(G_0^{LL}+G_i^{LL})}{dt}}`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{N}{3}}(G_0^{LL}+G_i^{LL})^2,`$ (5)
$`{\displaystyle \frac{d(G_0^{LL}3G_i^{LL})}{dt}}`$ $`=`$ $`N(G_0^{LL}3G_i^{LL})^2,`$ (6)
$`{\displaystyle \frac{d(G_0^{LR}+3G_i^{LR})}{dt}}`$ $`=`$ $`0,`$ (7)
$`{\displaystyle \frac{d(G_0^{LR}G_i^{LR})}{dt}}`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{2N}{3}}(G_0^{LR}G_i^{LR})^2.`$ (8)
The linear combination $`G_{}=G_0^{LL}+G_i^{LL}`$ reaches its Landau pole first, governed by the equation

$$G_{}(t)=\frac{1}{1+(N/3)G_{}(0)t}.$$
(9)
In general, interactions which are attractive at the matching scale, $`G_{}(0)>0`$, will grow during the evolution, and reach a Landau pole at the scale $`t_{}=3/(NG_{}(0))`$. The corresponding energy scale is

$$\mathrm{\Lambda }_{IR}=\mathrm{\Lambda }_{UV}\mathrm{exp}\left(\frac{3}{NG_{}(0)}\right),$$
(10)
which agrees with the usual BCS result. Repulsive interactions, corresponding to negative initial values of the coupling, become weaker near the Fermi surface.

## 3 High Density Limit

In the high density limit the typical momentum transfer between quarks is large, and therefore the effective coupling is small. The properties of this phase can be deduced in a systematic, weak coupling expansion. However, there is one technical problem that must be solved having to do with soft magnetic gluons. In the renormalization of the Cooper pairing interaction there is a region of phase space where the incoming quarks are only slightly deflected by the gluon exchange. This leads to an IR divergence unless arbitrarily soft gluons are screened in some way. While gluons acquire a perturbative electric mass at high density, it can be shown that to all orders in perturbation theory no magnetic mass is generated . The only hope is that Landau damping – a form of dynamic screening affecting the spacelike gluons – is enough to control this IR problem. That this is so was first pointed out by Son , who went on to deduce the following behavior for the diquark gap at weak coupling

$$\mathrm{\Delta }\mu g^5\mathrm{exp}\left(\frac{3\pi ^2}{\sqrt{2}g}\right).$$
(11)
This result has since been confirmed by RG methods  as well as Schwinger-Dyson techniques . In this section I discuss some of the details of these calculations, concentrating on the the RG approach.

The magnetic gluon propagator, including vacuum polarization effects from virtual quarks,  has the form ($`q_0<<q`$)

$$D_{\mu \nu }^T(q_0,q)=\frac{P_{\mu \nu }^T}{q^2+i\frac{\pi }{2}m_D^2\frac{|q_0|}{q}}.$$
(12)
Strictly speaking $`D_{\mu \nu }^T`$ is gauge dependent, but in our leading order calculations the propagator always appears contracted with gamma matrices next to nearly on-shell external quark lines. Thus the gauge dependent parts are higher order in g due to the equations of motion. The effect of Landau damping is to cut off the small-q divergence in (12) at $`qq_0^{1/3}m_D^{2/3}`$, where $`m_D^2=N_f\frac{g^2\mu ^2}{2\pi ^2}`$ is the Debye screening mass. A common feature of both the Schwinger-Dyson and RG calculations in the weak coupling region is loop integrals dominated by energy transfers of order $`q_0\mathrm{\Delta }`$, and hence momentum transfers of order $`q_{}\mathrm{\Delta }^{1/3}m_D^{2/3}`$. $`q_{}`$ can be made as large as desired by going to high density.

The main technical problem in the RG approach is long range magnetic interactions, or equivalently the presence of soft gluons. At no point can the theory be completely described by quarks with purely local interactions as in (2). The effective Lagrangian contains both quark and gluon excitations (with energies below the cutoff $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$) and local interactions resulting from integration of higher energy shells. This modifies the form of the RG equations obtained , so that equations (5) and (6) become

$`{\displaystyle \frac{d(G_0^{LL}+G_i^{LL})}{dt}}`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{N}{3}}(G_0^{LL}+G_i^{LL})^2{\displaystyle \frac{g^2}{9\mu ^2}},`$ (13)
$`{\displaystyle \frac{d(G_0^{LL}3G_i^{LL})}{dt}}`$ $`=`$ $`N(G_0^{LL}3G_i^{LL})^2+{\displaystyle \frac{g^2}{27\mu ^2}}.`$ (14)
The solution of these RG equations leads to a Landau pole in the dominant $`\overline{3}`$, LL and RR channels given by (11). It is worth commenting on the angular momentum of the condensate. The RG equations can be derived for general values of angular momentum l. Naively interpreted, the results suggest that condensates might occur in higher l channels, leading to the breaking of O(3) rotational invariance. A more detailed gap equation analysis  shows that this is not the case: a large s-wave gap suppresses the formation of p-wave and higher l gaps. The literature is somewhat confused on this important issue. The papers in  address the issue of rotational invariance and do not agree on the size of higher l gaps. However, neither paper addresses the interplay of s-wave and higher l gaps, which is studied in .

## 4 The QCD Groundstate at High Density

In this section I describe the vacuum energy analysis necessary to determine the groundstate of QCD at high density . Neither the RG nor Schwinger-Dyson analyses are sufficient to specify the actual groundstate. Strictly speaking, the former only reveals the energy scale and quantum numbers of the pairing instability, while the latter only identifies extrema of the vacuum energy. As we shall see, there are additional subtleties which can only be resolved by consideration of energetics.

First, let us consider the case of 2 massless flavors. Because the condensate occurs between pairs of either left (LL) or right (RR) handed quarks in the J=L=S=0 channel , and the $`\overline{3}`$ color channel is antisymmetric, the quarks must pair in the isospin singlet (ud - du) flavor channel. However, even in this case there is a subtlety, as the relative color orientations of the LL and RR condensates are not determined by the usual leading order analysis. A misalignment of these condensates violates parity, and further breaks the gauge group beyond $`\mathrm{SU}(3)_\mathrm{c}\mathrm{SU}(2)_\mathrm{c}`$. An analysis of the Meissner effect is necessary to determine the relative orientation , and the effect is higher order in g. There are thus a number of unstable configurations of only slightly higher energy with different color-flavor orientations (and hence different symmetry breaking patterns), leading to the possibility of disorienting the diquark condensate (see figure (3)).

The generalization to three flavors is far from straightforward. Again, one can show that the condensate must occur in the J=L=S=0 and color $`\overline{3}`$ channel. (The sextet condensate is suppressed in the weak coupling limit  and I do not discuss it here.) The Pauli principle then requires that the flavor structure again be antisymmetric $`(q_iq_jq_jq_i)`$, for quarks of flavor $`i,j`$. Thus, one can have combinations of condensates which are in the $`\overline{3}`$ of both color and flavor $`\mathrm{SU}(3)_\mathrm{L}`$ or $`\mathrm{SU}(3)_\mathrm{R}`$. Due to the chirality preserving nature of perturbative gluon exchange, there is no mixing of LL and RR condensates, which form independently. One can immediately see that there are a number of possibilities. For example, the condensates for the three flavors and both chiralities might all align in color space, leading to an $`\mathrm{SU}(3)_\mathrm{c}\mathrm{SU}(2)_\mathrm{c}`$ breaking pattern. A more complicated condensate has been proposed  called Color Flavor Locking (CFL), in which the $`\overline{3}`$ color orientations are “locked” to the $`\overline{3}`$ flavor orientation. In figure (4) we give a simple picture of CFL condensation.

To determine the nature of the energy surface governing the various color-flavor orientations of the condensate, we can begin by characterizing the color-flavor configuration space of condensates. We consider the ansätz

$$\mathrm{\Delta }_{ij}^{ab}{}_{}{}^{L,R}=A_k^c{}_{}{}^{L,R}ϵ_{}^{abc}ϵ_{ijk},$$
(15)
where a,b are color and i,j flavor indices. L and R denote pairing between pairs of left and right handed quarks, respectively. Under color and flavor A transforms as

$$A^LU_cA^LV^L,$$
(16)
where $`U_c`$ is an element of $`\mathrm{SU}(3)_\mathrm{c}`$ and $`V^L`$ of $`\mathrm{SU}(3)_\mathrm{L}`$. A similar equation holds for $`A^R`$. It is always possible to diagonalize $`A^L`$ by appropriate choice of $`U_c`$ and $`V^L`$:

$$A^L=\left(\begin{array}{ccc}a& 0& 0\\ 0& b& 0\\ 0& 0& c\end{array}\right).$$
(17)
Generically, there does not exist a $`V^R`$ which diagonalizes $`A^R`$ in this basis. In the CFL case, where the diagonalized $`A^L`$ is proportional to the identity, $`a=b=c`$, it is easy to show that one can choose $`V^R`$ such that $`A^R=\pm A^L`$. These two configurations are related by a $`U(1)_A`$ rotation (see section 3). Hence, they are degenerate in the high density limit where gluon exchange dominates. Instanton effects, important at intermediate density, favor $`A^R=A^L`$. Note that parity, if unbroken, requires $`A^L=A^R`$, and hence implies simultaneous diagonalizability.

In  we considered the potential vacua parametrized by a,b,c. First, we use the Dyson-Schwinger (gap) equation to determine which of these configurations are energy extrema. Next, we computed the energies of the extrema to determine the true groundstate. A similar analysis has been carried out by Schäfer and Wilczek  in the approximation where gluon interactions are replaced by local four fermion interactions. They concluded that the CFL vacuum had the lowest energy. In our analysis, which I summarize below, we included the gluons in the analysis, introducing long range color-magnetic fluctuations (controlled by Landau damping) and Meissner screening into the gap equation and vacuum energy calculations.

At asymptoticaly high densities (weak coupling) the diagrams (a)-(c) in figure (5) give the leading approximation to the effective action. Note that in these diagrams the quark propagators include the diquark condensate (see (20) below), and the gluon propagators include Landau damping, but not the Meissner effect. The latter arises from the condensate-dependence of quark loops in diagrams (c) and (d). The resulting gap equation (figure (6)), with condensate shown explicitly at lowest order in $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$) is given by

$$S^1(q)S_0^1(q)=ig^2\frac{d^4k}{(2\pi )^4}\mathrm{\Gamma }_\mu ^AS(k)\mathrm{\Gamma }_\nu ^BD_{AB}^{\mu \nu }(kq),$$
(18)
where

$$\mathrm{\Gamma }_\mu ^A=\left(\begin{array}{cc}\gamma _\mu T^A& 0\\ 0& C(\gamma _\mu T^A)^TC^1\end{array}\right).$$
(19)
$`D_{AB}^{\mu \nu }`$ is the gluon propagator, including the effects of Landau damping and Debye screening (we assume Feynman gauge throughout).

We will restrict the color group structure in the gap equation to the attractive anti-symmetric $`\overline{3}`$ channel, which projects out the anti-symmetric part of $`S(k)`$ in color space in the gap equation. Here $`S`$ is the fermion propagator for the spinor $`(\psi _a^i,\psi _a^{iC})`$ with $`i`$ a flavor index and $`a`$ a color index.

For the three flavor case $`S`$ can be written explicitly as an $`18\times 18`$ matrix in color flavor space. The inverse propagator may be written

$$S^1(q)=\left(\begin{array}{cc}q/+\mu /& \gamma _0\mathrm{\Delta }^{}\gamma _0\\ \mathrm{\Delta }& q/\mu /\end{array}\right)$$
(20)
where $`\mu /=\mu \gamma _0`$. $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$ is a $`9\times 9`$ matrix which for the ansätz (17) takes the form

$$\mathrm{\Delta }=\left(\begin{array}{ccccccccc}0& 0& 0& 0& c& 0& 0& 0& b\\ 0& 0& 0& c& 0& 0& 0& 0& 0\\ 0& 0& 0& 0& 0& 0& b& 0& 0\\ 0& c& 0& 0& 0& 0& 0& 0& 0\\ c& 0& 0& 0& 0& 0& 0& 0& a\\ 0& 0& 0& 0& 0& 0& 0& a& 0\\ 0& 0& b& 0& 0& 0& 0& 0& 0\\ 0& 0& 0& 0& 0& a& 0& 0& 0\\ b& 0& 0& 0& a& 0& 0& 0& 0\end{array}\right)$$
(21)
Because we are dealing with a diquark condensate the non-trivial part of the gap equation involves the lower left $`9\times 9`$ block. We will refer to this sub-block of the propagator $`S`$ as $`S_{21}`$.

For a particular ansätz $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$ to be a solution to the gap equation we require that the color antisymmetric part of $`T^AS_{21}(k)T^A`$ (corresponding to the $`\overline{3}`$ channel) be proportional in color-flavor space to the off-diagonal 21 submatrix of $`S^1(q)S_0^1(q)`$, or $`\mathrm{\Delta }(q)`$, which appears on the LHS of the gap equation (see  for more discussion of this point).

The propagator may be found by inverting the sparse matrix in (20) using Mathematica. Only three ansätze satisfy our condition: $`a=b=c`$; $`a=b,c=0`$; $`b=c=0`$. We refer to these solutions as (111) (color-flavor locking), (110) ($`30`$ breaking) and (100) ($`32`$ breaking) respectively. For these ansätze the color antisymmetric part of $`T^AS_{21}(k)T^A`$ has the form of a constant multiplying the matrix form (21) with $`a,b,c`$ set to 0 or 1 as is appropriate for the ansätz. After contour integration over l, we find the following gap kernels

$`(111)`$ $`:`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{2}{3}}{\displaystyle \frac{\mathrm{\Delta }}{\sqrt{k_0^2+\mathrm{\Delta }^2}}}+{\displaystyle \frac{1}{3}}{\displaystyle \frac{\mathrm{\Delta }}{\sqrt{k_0^2+4\mathrm{\Delta }^2}}}`$
$`(110)`$ $`:`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{\mathrm{\Delta }}{2\sqrt{k_0^2+\mathrm{\Delta }^2}}}+{\displaystyle \frac{\mathrm{\Delta }}{2\sqrt{k_0^2+2\mathrm{\Delta }^2}}}`$
$`(100)`$ $`:`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{\mathrm{\Delta }}{\sqrt{k_0^2+\mathrm{\Delta }^2}}}`$ (22)
These kernels are to be substituted in the following gap equation, which we obtain under the approximation $`q_0<<|\stackrel{}{q}|`$. (We also neglected the anti-particle contributions, which are suppressed by powers of $`1/\mu `$.)

$`\mathrm{\Delta }(p_0)`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{g^2}{12\pi ^2}}{\displaystyle }dq_0{\displaystyle }d\mathrm{cos}\theta ({\displaystyle \frac{\frac{3}{2}\frac{1}{2}\mathrm{cos}\theta }{1\mathrm{cos}\theta +(G+(p_0q_0)^2)/(2\mu ^2)}}`$
$`+{\displaystyle \frac{\frac{1}{2}+\frac{1}{2}\mathrm{cos}\theta }{1\mathrm{cos}\theta +(F+(p_0q_0)^2)/(2\mu ^2)}})K(q_0),`$
where F and G represent the medium effects on the electric and magnetic gluons, and $`K(q_0)`$ is one of the gap kernels from (22). The Meissner effect makes an additional contribution to G beyond that of Landau damping. In  we evaluated the gluon vacuum polarization $`P_{\mu \nu }(q_0,q)`$ in the presence of a diquark condensate. (A more detailed computation of the Meissner effect is given by Rischke , with similar results.) The additional Meissner screening is given by $`\delta G\frac{1}{2}𝒫_{ij}^TP_{ij},`$ where $`𝒫_{ij}^T=\left(\delta _{ij}\widehat{q}_i\widehat{q}_j\right)`$ is the transverse projection operator. At low momenta, $`q_0,q\mathrm{\Delta }`$, $`\delta G(q_0,q)`$ is of order the Debye mass $`m_Dg\mu `$, while at larger energy or momenta the effect is suppressed by a power of $`\frac{\mathrm{\Delta }}{q_0}`$ or $`\frac{\mathrm{\Delta }}{q}`$. We limited ourselves to an estimate of the size of the Meissner effect on the gap solutions. To this end, we used the following approximation for $`\delta G`$:

$$\delta G(q_0,q)m_D^2\frac{\mathrm{\Delta }_0}{\sqrt{q^2+q_0^2+\mathrm{\Delta }_0^2}},$$
(24)
where $`\mathrm{\Delta }_0`$ is the maximum value of the function $`\mathrm{\Delta }(k_0,k)`$. Note we did not introduce any color structure in $`\delta G`$; all gluons experience the same magnetic screening. While this is a crude approximation, it gives the rough size of the Meissner effect on $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$.

We solved the gap equations for all three gap kernels using this form of the Meissner effect, and the results are shown in figure (7) for the case of $`\mu =400`$ MeV. The effect is to decrease the size of the condensate but it is a small perturbation on the solutions obtained without the Meissner effect.

To determine which of the above gaps is the true minimum energy state we must calculate the vacuum energy, which receives contributions from vacuum to vacuum loops of both quarks and gluons (figure 1). We start with the CJT effective potential , which upon extremization wrt appropriate propagators and vertices leads to the Schwinger-Dyson equations. The fermion equation is the gap equation given above, while the gluon equation reproduces Landau damping. We wish to compare energies corresponding to our three solutions to determine which one is the true vacuum (the difference in energies $`V`$ will be gauge invariant, whereas actual values are not). It is easy to show that the value of the effective potential evaluated on the gap solution is given by:

$$V=i\frac{d^4p}{(2\pi )^4}\mathrm{trln}S(p)/S_0(p).$$
(25)
Diagramatically, this is equivalent to the graph of figure 1(a) when evaluated on the gap solution.

The fermion loops are most easily calculated by going to a basis where $`S_0S^1`$ is diagonal in color-flavor space. Note that the gap matrix $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$ has non-trivial Dirac structure that must be accounted for : $`\mathrm{\Delta }=\mathrm{\Delta }_1\gamma _5P_++\mathrm{\Delta }_2\gamma _5P_{}`$, where $`P_\pm `$ are particle and anti-particle projectors. Our analysis has been restricted to the particle gap function $`\mathrm{\Delta }_1`$. The anti-particle gap function $`\mathrm{\Delta }_2`$ has its support near $`k_02\mu `$, and its contribution to the vacuum energy is suppressed. There are 18 eigenvalues, which occur in 9 pairs. The product of each pair is of the form

$$\left(1+a\frac{\mathrm{\Delta }^2(k_o,k)}{k_0^2+(|\stackrel{}{k}|\mu )^2}\right),$$
(26)
where a is an integer. For our three cases we obtain the following sets of eigenvalues:

$`(111)`$ $``$ $`8\times \{a=1\},1\times \{a=4\}`$
$`(110)`$ $``$ $`4\times \{a=1\},2\times \{a=2\}`$
$`(100)`$ $``$ $`4\times \{a=1\}`$ (27)
The binding energy is of order

$`E_q`$ $``$ $`{\displaystyle d^3k𝑑k_0\mathrm{ln}\left[1+a\frac{\mathrm{\Delta }^2(k_0,k)}{k_0^2+(k\mu )^2}\right]}`$ (28)
$``$ $`a\mu ^2\mathrm{\Delta }_0^2,`$ (29)
where $`\mathrm{\Delta }_0`$ is the maximum value of the gap function $`\mathrm{\Delta }(k_0,k)`$, which has rather broad support in both energy and momentum space away from the Fermi surface. A more precise answer than (28) requires numerical evaluation, but it is clear that the result scales with a and has only a weak (logarithmic) dependence on the variations in the shape of $`\mathrm{\Delta }(k_0,k)`$. Substituting our numerical results for the gaps in the three cases, it is easy to establish that

$$E(111)<E(110)<E(100).$$
(30)
We find that the CFL vacua remains the lowest energy state, at least at asymptotically high densities where the calculation is reliable. The Meissner effect is a small correction to the vacuum energy at asymptotic densities. Configurations which satisfy the gap equations but are not the global minimum of energy are presumably saddlepoints, since they are continuously connected to the CFL vacuum via color and flavor rotations.

## 5 Conclusions

In this contribution I have tried to summarize some important progress of the last two years on the theory of cold, dense quark matter. Due to space limitations, I was not able to discuss a number of important issues, such as the low energy effective Lagrangian, continuity of hadronic and quark phases and more phenomenological studies. I list some of the important papers in .

I thank my collaborators N. Evans, J. Hormuzdiar and M. Schwetz and my colleagues D. Hong, R. Pisarski, K. Rajagopal, M. Rho, D. Rischke and T. Schäfer for contributing to my understanding of this subject. My research was supported under DOE contract DE-FG06-85ER40224 and by a JSPS visiting fellowship.