This is a collection of pedagogical lectures and research papers that were presented during a combined course/conference program held at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste in the summer of 1991. The lectures begin from an elementary level and were intended to bring student participants to the point where they could appreciate the research conference that came at the end of program.
The program of the Institute covered several aspects of functional integration -from a robust mathematical foundation to many applications, heuristic and rigorous, in mathematics, physics, and chemistry. It included analytic and numerical computational techniques. One of the goals was to encourage cross-fertilization between these various aspects and disciplines. The first week was focused on quantum and classical systems with a finite number of degrees of freedom; the second week on field theories. During the first week the basic course, given by P. Cartier, was a presentation of a recent rigorous approach to functional integration which does not resort to discretization, nor to analytic continuation. It provides a definition of functional integrals simpler and more powerful than the original ones. Could this approach accommodate the works presented by the other lecturers? Although much remains to be done before answering "Yes," there seems to be no major obstacle along the road. The other courses taught during the first week presented: a) a solid introduction to functional numerical techniques (A. Sokal) and their applications to functional integrals encountered in chemistry (N. Makri). b) integrals based on Poisson processes and their applications to wave propagation (S. K. Foong), in particular a wave-restorer or wave-designer algorithm yielding the initial wave profile when one can only observe its distortion through a dissipative medium. c) the formulation of a quantum equivalence principle (H. Kleinert) which. given the flat space theory, yields a well-defined quantum theory in spaces with curvature and torsion.
The topics discussed in the Tutzing conference are applications of path integrals in quantum chaos, quantum tunneling, Monte Carlo methods, polarons, solid state physics, physical chemistry, and others. The reports by experts in the fields are timely; the results reported are mostly new. This volume reveals how broad the range of path integral applications has become.
The motion of a particle undergoing quantum tunneling has long been an open and debated problem in several aspects. One of the most discussed is the determination of the time spent in such processes, but many other features deserve consideration. In this volume, both theoretical and experimental aspects, such as quantum measurement, optical analogy, experimental tests, solid state devices and time scale for anomalies (quantum Zeno effect and superluminal evanescence), are explored.
