Informal Phenomenology Seminar

This talk briefly reviews the basic ideas of `t Hooft's derivation of quantum from classical physics. In the core part of the talk I describe new results with Massimo Blasone and Hagen Kleinert in which we show how `t Hooft's program can be phrased in terms of Gozzi's path integral formulation of classical mechanics. It is further shown that by employing the Faddeev-Jackiw (or Dirac-Bergmann) treatment of classical constrained systems `t Hooft's constraint condition may indeed yield a genuine quantum-mechanical partition function. I also emphasize a surprising role that the BRST invariance plays in the whole scheme. With two simple examples (the planar mathematical pendulum and Roessler dynamical system) I will examine some of the consequences that follow from our approach.