Quantum stochastic processes

In order to describe rigorously certain measurement procedures, where observations of the arrival of quanta at a counter are made throughout an interval of time, it is necessary to introduce the concept of a quantum stochastic process. While fully quantum mechanical in nature, these have a great deal of similarity with classical stochastic processes and can be characterized by and constructed from their infinitesimal generators. The infinitestimal generators are naturally obtained from certain fields which we prove must be of the boson or fermion type.This work was supported by a National Science Foundation grant GP-7952X.