Abstract
Using as a prototype example the harmonic oscillator we show how losing self-adjointness of the Hamiltonian changes drastically the related functional structure. In particular, we show that even a small deviation from strict self-adjointness of produces two deep consequences, not well understood in the literature: First of all, the original orthonormal basis of splits into two families of biorthogonal vectors. These two families are complete but, contrarily to what often claimed for similar systems, none of them is a basis for the Hilbert space . Second, the so-called metric operator is unbounded, as well as its inverse. In the second part of the paper, after an extension of some previous results on the so-called pseudobosons, we discuss some aspects of our extended harmonic oscillator from this different point of view.
- Received 2 September 2013
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.88.032120
©2013 American Physical Society