Wick quantization of cotangent bundles over Riemannian manifolds

A simple geometric procedure is proposed for constructing Wick symbols on cotangent bundles of Riemannian manifolds. The main ingredient of the construction is a method of endowing the cotangent bundle with a formal Kahler structure. The formality means that the metric is lifted from the Riemannian manifold Q to its phase space T*Q in the form of formal power series in momenta with the coefficients being tensor fields on the base. The corresponding Kahler two-form on the total space of T*Q coincides with the canonical symplectic form, while the canonical projection of the Kahler metric on the base manifold reproduces the original metric. Some examples are considered, including constant curvature space and nonlinear sigma-models, illustrating the general construction. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.