ALTERNATIVE HAMILTONIAN DESCRIPTIONS FOR QUANTUM SYSTEMS AND NON-HERMITIAN OPERATORS WITH REAL SPECTRUM

Abstract

Many problems in theoretical physics are very frequently dealt with non-Hermitian operators. Recently there has been a lot of interest in non-Hermitian operators with real spectra. In this paper, by using the inverse problem for quantum systems, we show that, on finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces, all diagonalizable operators with a real spectrum can be made Hermitian with respect to a properly chosen inner product. In particular this allows the use of standard methods of quantum mechanics to analyze non-Hermitian operators with real spectra.