Negativity of the Coarse Grained Wigner Function as a Measure of Quantal Behavior

Keating, Tyler E; Steege, Adam T. C.; Pattanayak, Arjendu K.

Negativity of the Coarse Grained Wigner Function as a Measure of Quantal Behavior

Authors

Keating, Tyler E

Steege, Adam T. C.

Pattanayak, Arjendu K.

Description

The negativity of a given state's Wigner function has been proposed as a measure of quantumness of that state in a unipartite system. This otherwise physically intuitive and useful phase-space measure however does not yield the right correspondence principle limit, and also turns out to yield infinite values for the infinite square well. We show that both these issues can be sensibly resolved using coarse-graining of the Wigner function.
6 pages, 4 figures