A White noise approach to stochastic calculus

During the past 15 years a new technique, called the stochastic limit of quantum theory, has been applied to deduce new, unexpected results in a variety of traditional problems of quantum physics, such as quantum electrodynamics, bosonization in higher dimensions, the emergence of the noncrossing diagrams in the Anderson model, and in the large-N-limit in QCD, interacting commutation relations, new photon statistics in strong magnetic fields, etc. These achievements required the development of a new approach to classical and quantum stochastic calculus based on white noise which has suggested a natural nonlinear extension of this calculus. The natural theoretical framework of this new approach is the white-noise calculus initiated by T. Hida as a theory of infinite-dimensional generalized functions. In this paper, we describe the main ideas of the white-noise approach to stochastic calculus and we show that, even if we limit ourselves to the first-order case (i.e. neglecting the recent developments concerning higher powers of white noise and renormalization), some nontrivial extensions of known results in classical and quantum stochastic calculus can be obtained.