Hamiltonian Path Integrals in White Noise Analysis

This thesis is separated into three main parts: Development of Gaussian and White Noise Analysis, Hamiltonian Path Integrals as White Noise Distributions, Numerical methods for polymers driven by fractional Brownian motion. Throughout this thesis the Donsker's delta function plays a key role. We investigate this generalized function also in Chapter 2. Moreover we show by giving a counterexample, that the general definition for complex kernels is not true. In Chapter 3 we take a closer look to generalized Gauss kernels and generalize these concepts to the case of vector-valued White Noise. These results are the basis for Hamiltonian path integrals of quadratic type. The core result of this chapter gives conditions under which pointwise products of generalized Gauss kernels and certain Hida distributions have a mathematical rigorous meaning as distributions in the Hida space. In Chapter 4 we discuss operators which are related to applications for Feynman Integrals as differential operators, scaling, translation and projection. We show the relation of these operators to differential operators, which leads to the well-known notion of so called convolution operators. We generalize the central homomorphy theorem to regular generalized functions. We generalize the concept of complex scaling to scaling with bounded operators and discuss the relation to generalized Radon-Nikodym derivatives. With the help of this we consider products of generalized functions in chapter 5. We show that the projection operator from the Wick formula for products with Donsker's deltais not closable on the square-integrable functions. In Chapter 5 we discuss products of generalized functions. Moreover the Wick formula is revisited. We investigate under which conditions and on which spaces the Wick formula can be generalized to. At the end of the chapter we consider the products of Donsker's delta function with a generalized function with help of a measure transformation. Here also problems as measurability are concerned. In Chapter 6 we characterize Hamiltonian path integrands for the free particle, the harmonic oscillator and the charged particle in a constant magnetic field as Hida distributions. This is done in terms of the T-transform and with the help of the results from chapter 3. For the free particle and the harmonic oscillator we also investigate the momentum space propagators. At the same time, the $T$-transform of the constructed Feynman integrands provides us with their generating functional. In Chapter 7, we can show that the generalized expectation (generating functional at zero) gives the Greens function to the corresponding Schrodinger equation. Moreover, with help of the generating functional we can show that the canonical commutation relations for the free particle and the harmonic oscillator in phase space are fulfilled. This confirms on a mathematical rigorous level the heuristics developed by Feynman and Hibbs. In Chapter 8 we give an outlook, how the scaling approach which is successfully applied in the Feynman integral setting can be transferred to the phase space setting. We give a mathematical rigorous meaning to an analogue construction to the scaled Feynman-Kac kernel. It is open if the expression solves the Schrodinger equation. At least for quadratic potentials we can get the right physics. In the last chapter, we focus on the numerical analysis of polymer chains driven by fractional Brownian motion. Instead of complicated lattice algorithms, our discretization is based on the correlation matrix. Using fBm one can achieve a long-range dependence of the interaction of the monomers inside a polymer chain. Here a Metropolis algorithm is used to create the paths of a polymer driven by fBm taking the excluded volume effect in account.