ON THE PROBABILITY DENSITY INTERPRETATION OF SMOOTHED WIGNER FUNCTIONS

It has been conjectured that averages of the Wigner function over phase space volumes, larger than those of minimum uncertainty, are always positive. This is true for Gaussian averaging, so that the Husimi distribution is positive. However, the authors provide a specific counterexample for the averaging with a discontinuous hat function. The analysis of the specific system of a one-dimensional particle in a box also elucidates the respective advantages of the Wigner and the Husimi functions for the study of the semiclassical limit. The falsification of the averaging conjecture is shown not to depend on the discontinuities of the hat function, by considering the latter as the limit of a sequence of analytic functions.