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Non-positivity of Groenewold operators
A central feature in the Hilbert space formulation of classical mechanics is
the quantisation of classical Liouville densities, leading to what may be
termed term Groenewold operators. We investigate the spectra of the Groenewold
operators that correspond to Gaussian and to certain uniform Liouville
densities. We show that when the classical coordinate-momentum uncertainty
product falls below Heisenberg's limit, the Groenewold operators in the
Gaussian case develop negative eigenvalues and eigenvalues larger than 1.
However, in the uniform case, negative eigenvalues are shown to persist for
arbitrarily large values of the classical uncertainty product.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figures, submitted to Europhysics Letter
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