Originally published in 1981, this book forms volume 15 of the Encyclopedia of Mathematics and its Applications. The text provides a clear and thorough treatment of its subject, adhering to a clean exposition of the mathematical content of serious formulations of rational physical alternatives of quantum theory as elaborated in the influential works of the period, to which the authors made a significant contribution. The treatment falls into three distinct, logical parts: in the first part, the modern version of accumulated wisdom is presented, avoiding as far as possible the traditional language of classical physics for its interpretational character; in the second part, the individual structural elements for the logical content of the theory are laid out; in part three, the results of section two are used to reconstruct the usual Hilbert space formulation of quantum mechanics in a novel way.

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It is well known that the category of super Lie groups (SLG) is equivalent to the category of super Harish-Chandra pairs (SHCP). Using this equivalence, we define the category of unitary representations (UR's) of a super Lie group. We give an extension of the classical inducing construction and Mackey imprimitivity theorem to this setting. We use our results to classify the irreducible unitary representations of semidirect products of super translation groups by classical Lie groups, in particular of the super Poincaré groups in arbitrary dimension. Finally we compare our results with those in the physical literature on the structure and classification of super multiplets.

Various mathematical formulations of the symmetry group in quantum mechanics are investigated and shown to be mutually equivalent. A new proof of the theorem of Wigner on the symmetry transformations is worked out.

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We consider a semidirect product G=A×′H, with A abelian, and its unitary representations of the form [Formula: see text] where x0 is in the dual group of A, G0 is the stability group of x0 and m is an irreducible unitary representation of G0∩H. We give a new selfcontained proof of the following result: the induced representation [Formula: see text] is square-integrable if and only if the orbit G[x0] has nonzero Haar measure and m is square-integrable. Moreover we give an explicit form for the formal degree of [Formula: see text].

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