We will now evaluate the kernel
for a free particle. In this case, the action is just
Note that we renamed
to
and
to
the reason for this will become clear shortly. Let us now discretize the path that the particle takes, so that the intermediate positions are
We discretize the time axis similarly, with a spacing
between two subsequent times, so that
and so on. The action may then be written as
The kernel now becomes
We will now evaluate this integral. Let us first switch to the variables,
We then get
Although the multiple integral looks formidable, it is not. Let us begin by doing the integral over
Considering just the part of the integrand that involves
we get
Now let us evaluate the integral over
Again considering just the part of the integrand that involves
we get
We now continue to do this until all of the
have been integrated out. At the
step (i.e., integrating out
), the integral that we evaluate and the solution are
Combining all of these results together, we find that the kernel is
or, rewriting in terms of
and
Since we divided the time interval up into equal amounts, we note that
We may now take the limit, finally obtaining the free-particle propagator,