Let
be a self-adjoint operator. The Bogoliubov inner product of any two operators X and Y is defined as
![{\displaystyle \langle X,Y\rangle _{A}=\int \limits _{0}^{1}{\rm {Tr}}[{\rm {e}}^{xA}X^{\dagger }{\rm {e}}^{(1-x)A}Y]dx}](https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/svg/bbca65a5bd377c3db40b1f1334f06c621eb4bbb9)
The Bogoliubov inner product satisfies all the axioms of the inner product: it is sesquilinear, positive semidefinite (i.e.,
), and satisfies the symmetry property
where
is the complex conjugate of
.
In applications to quantum statistical mechanics, the operator
has the form
, where
is the Hamiltonian of the quantum system and
is the inverse temperature. With these notations, the Bogoliubov inner product takes the form

where
denotes the thermal average with respect to the Hamiltonian
and inverse temperature
.
In quantum statistical mechanics, the Bogoliubov inner product appears as the second order term in the expansion of the statistical sum:
