Ground-state Wigner functional of linearized gravitational field

The deformation quantization formalism is applied to the linearized gravitational field. Standard aspects of this formalism are worked out before the ground state Wigner functional is obtained. Finally, the propagator for the graviton is also discussed within the context of this formalism.Comment: 18 pages, no figure

Construction of a photon position operator with commuting components from natural axioms

A general form of the photon position operator with commuting components fulfilling some natural axioms is obtained. This operator commutes with the photon helicity operator, is Hermitian with respect to the Bialynicki-Birula scalar product and defined up to a unitary transformation preserving the transversality condition. It is shown that, using the procedure analogous to the one introduced by T. T. Wu and C. N. Yang for the case of the Dirac magnetic monopole, the photon position operator can be defined by a flat connection in some trivial vector bundle over $\mathbb{R}^3 \setminus \{(0,0,0)\}$. This observation enables us to reformulate quantum mechanics of a~single photon on $(\mathbb{R}^{3} \setminus \{(0,0,0)\}) \times \mathbb{C}^2$.Comment: 19 pages, some corrections, to appear in Phys. Rev.

The damped harmonic oscillator in deformation quantization

We propose a new approach to the quantization of the damped harmonic oscillator in the framework of deformation quantization. The quantization is performed in the Schr\"{o}dinger picture by a star-product induced by a modified "Poisson bracket". We determine the eigenstates in the damped regime and compute the transition probability between states of the undamped harmonic oscillator after the system was submitted to dissipation.Comment: Plain LaTex file, 11 page