Symplectic capacities and the geometry of uncertainty: The irruption of symplectic topology in classical and quantum mechanics

This paper aims at conducting an analysis of various uncertainty principles from a topological point of view where the notion of symplectic capacity plays a key role. The existence of symplectic capacities follows from a deep theorem of symplectic topology, Gromov’s non-squeezing theorem, which was discovered in the mid 1980’s, and which has led to numerous developments whose applications to Physics are not fully understood or exploited at the time of writing. We will show that the notion of symplectic non-squeezing contains, as a watermark, not only the Robertson–Schrödinger uncertainty relations (and a classical version thereof), but also Hardy’s uncertainty principle for a function and its Fourier transform. This observation will allow us to formulate the characterization of positivity for density matrices in a topological way. We also address some open questions and conjectures, whose solution cannot be given at the present time due to the lack of a sufficiently developed mathematical theory.