Extended uncertainty from first principles

A translation operator acting in a space with a diagonal metric is introduced to describe the motion of a particle in a quantum system. We show that the momentum operator and, as a consequence, the uncertainty relation now depend on the metric. It is also shown that, for any metric expanded up to second order, this formalism naturally leads to an extended uncertainty principle (EUP) with a minimum momentum dispersion. The Ehrenfest theorem is modified to include an additional term related to a tidal force arriving from the space curvature introduced by the metric. For one-dimensional systems, we show how to map a harmonic potential to an effective potential in Euclidean space using different metrics. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license.