An Elementary Derivation of the Harmonic Oscillator Propagator

Abstract

The harmonic oscillator propagator is found straightforwardly from the free particle propagator, within the imaginary-time Feynman path integral formalism. The derivation presented here is extremely simple, requiring only elementary mathematical manipulations and no clever use of Hermite polynomials, annihilation & creation operators, cumbersome determinant evaluations or any kind of involved algebra.

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References in corpus (2)

• Three Methods for Computing the Feynman Propagator
• The Zeta Function Method and the Harmonic Oscillator Propagator

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