PATH INTEGRALS FOR QUASI-HERMITIAN HAMILTONIANS

Abstract

Inner products in quasi-Hermitian quantum theories, and hence probabilities, are defined through a metric that depends on the details of the Hamiltonians themselves. We shall see that the functional integral for quasi-Hermitian theories, and hence Feynman diagrams, for example, can be calculated without needing to evaluate the metric. The reason turns out be that their derivation is based fundamentally on the Heisenberg equations of motion and the canonical equal-time commutation relations, which retain their standard form. As an application, we show how co-ordinate transformations in the path integral can enable us to recover equivalent Hermitian Hamiltonians.