THE FUNCTIONAL INTEGRAL ON THE HALF-LINE

A quantum Hamiltonian, defined on the half-line, will typically not lead to unitary time evolution unless the domain of the Hamiltonian is carefully specified. Different choices of the domain result in different Green’s functions. For a wide class of non-relativistic Hamiltonians we show how to define the functional integral on the half-line in a way which matches the various Green’s functions. To do so we analytically continue, in time, functional integrals constructed with real measures that give weight to paths on the half-line according to how much time they spend near the origin.