Jon Ziprick Colloquium

Fri. Jan. 13 12:30 PM - Tue. Nov. 8 01:20 PM
Location: 3M69

Jon Ziprick was a former undergraduate and MSc student of the University of Winnipeg before completing his PhD at Perimeter Institute. Jon is now working at the University of New Brunswick.

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Polymer quantization

Classical particle mechanics may be written in terms of the position and momentum of a particle. In Schrodinger quantization, momentum becomes a derivative operator which acts upon wavefunctions of the position (or vice versa). Underlying all of this is the implicit assumption that space is a continuum.

A common idea in quantum gravity research is that space may be discrete at small scales. If this is true, then the interpretation of momentum as a derivative operator is no longer valid, and alternative methods which take discreteness into account should be used instead. In this talk we introduce one such method, called "polymer quantization", and apply it to the "particle in a box" problem as an example. We discuss the similarities and differences between Schrodinger and polymer methods in this toy model, as well as in other more physical systems.