On the Fock quantisation of the hydrogen atom

In a celebrated work, Fock explained the degeneracy of the energy levels of the Kepler problem (or hydrogen atom) (Z. Phys. 98, 145-54, 1935) in terms of the dynamical symmetry group SO(4). Making a stereographic projection in the momentum space and rescaling the momenta with the eigenvalues of the energy, he showed that the problem is equivalent to the geodesic flow on the sphere S3. In this way, the 'hidden' symmetry SO(4) is made manifest. The present author has shown that the classical n-dimensional Kepler problem can be better understood by enlarging the phase space of the geodesical motion on S'' and including time and energy as canonical variables: a following symplectomorphism transforms the motion on S'' in the Kepler problem. We want to prove in this paper that the Fock procedure is the implementation at 'quantum' level of the above-mentioned symplectomorphism. The interest is not restricted to the old Kepler problem: more recently two other systems exhibiting the same symmetries have been found. They are the McIntosh-Cisneros-Zwanziger system and the geodesic motion in Euclidean Taub-NUT space. Both have a physical interest: they indeed describe a spinless test particle moving outside the core of a self-dual monopole and the asymptotic scattering of two self-dual monopoles, respectively. (author)