Abstract

Uniformities describing the distinguishability of states and of observables are discussed in the context of general statistical theories and are shown to be related to distinguished subspaces of continuous observables and states, respectively. The usual formalism of quantum mechanics contains no such physical uniformity for states. Using recently developed tools of quantum harmonic analysis, a natural one-to-one correspondence between continuous subspaces of nonrelativistic quantum and classical mechanics is established, thus exhibiting a close interrelation between physical uniformities for quantum states and compactifications of phase space. General properties of the completions of the quantum state space with respect to these uniformities are discussed