Spherical Harmonics, the Weyl Transform and the Fourier Transform on the Heisenberg Group

Abstract

In the early days of quantum mechanics, Weyl asked the following question. Let λ be a non-zero real number, ℋa separable Hilbert space. Given certain (unbounded) operators W1,…,Wn,W1+, …, Wn+ on ℋ satisfying(on a dense subspace D of ℋ) with all other commutators vanishing. Given also a function where ζ ∈ Cn. Let W = (W1 …, Wn) W+ = (W1+ …, Wn+). How does one associate to f an operator f(W, W+)? (Actually, Weyl phrased the question in terms of p = Re ζ, q = Im ζ, P = Re W, Q = Im W+ which represent momentum and position. In this paper, however, we wish to exploit the unitary group on Cn and so prefer complex notation.)