Jacobi's Action and the Density of States
Abstract
Description
The authors have introduced recently a ``microcanonical functional integral" which yields directly the density of states as a function of energy. The phase of the functional integral is Jacobi's action, the extrema of which are classical solutions at a given energy. This approach is general but is especially well suited to gravitating systems because for them the total energy can be fixed simply as a boundary condition on the gravitational field. In this paper, however, we ignore gravity and illustrate the use of Jacobi's action by computing the density of states for a nonrelativistic harmonic oscillator. (Festschrift for Dieter Brill)
10 pages, plain tex. (This replaces the previous version which consisted of less than half of the manuscript.)
10 pages, plain tex. (This replaces the previous version which consisted of less than half of the manuscript.)