The unstable system and irreversible motion in quantum theory

It has been shown by Flesia and Piron that the scattering theory of Lax and Phillips, developed primarily for the treatment of hyperbolic systems (e.g., classical scattering of electromagnetic waves on a finite target), can be applied to the quantum theory. In order to construct the correspondence, the continuously infinite family of (isomorphic) Hilbert spaces associated with each value of the time t are taken to be a direct integral representation (with a choice of measure) of a larger Hilbert space which includes the variable t in its measure space. We show that this theory, for which the evolution contracted to the subspace orthogonal to the incoming and outgoing subspaces is a contractive semigroup, provides a natural description of the irreversible motion of an unstable quantum system. (orig.)