Speaker
Paolo Facchi
Description
Abstract:
Hermitian operators that fail to be self-adjoint are ubiquitous in quantum mechanics, from boundary-value problems and singular interactions to effective descriptions of open systems. Their non-self-adjointness is often interpreted as a fundamental loss of unitarity or reversibility. Building on Naimark’s dilation theorem, I will show how non-unitarity emerges from the folding and projection of unitary dynamics onto an incomplete domain. The resulting picture reveals non-self-adjoint observables as shadows of an underlying unitary structure.