Dirac’s Formalism for Time-Dependent Hamiltonian Systems in the Extended Phase Space

Abstract

Dirac’s formalism for constrained systems is applied to the analysis of time-dependent Hamiltonians in the extended phase space. We show that the Lewis invariant is a reparametrization invariant, and we calculate the Feynman propagator using the extended phase space description. We show that the Feynman propagator’s quantum phase is given by the boundary term of the canonical transformation of the extended phase space. We propose a new canonical transformation within the extended phase space that leads to a Lewis invariant generalization, and we sketch some possible applications.

Keywords

• time-dependent quantum mechanics
• quantum cosmology
• path integrals