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Cambridge University Press eBooks

THE CLUSTER DECOMPOSITION PRINCIPLE

Steven Weinberg

Published Jun 30, 1995• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Up to this point we have not had much to say about the detailed structure of the Hamiltonian operator H . This operator can be defined by giving all its matrix elements between states with arbitrary numbers of particles. Equivalently, as we shall show here, any such operator may be expressed as a function of certain operators that create and destroy single particles. We saw in Chapter 1 that such creation and annihilation operators were first encountered in the canonical quantization of the electromagnetic field and other fields in the early days of quantum mechanics. They provided a natural formalism for theories in which massive particles as well as photons can be produced and destroyed, beginning in the early 1930s with Fermi's theory of beta decay. However, there is a deeper reason for constructing the Hamiltonian out of creation and annihilation operators, which goes beyond the need to quantize any pre-existing field theory like electrodynamics, and has nothing to do with whether particles can actually be produced or destroyed. The great advantage of this formalism is that if we express the Hamiltonian as a sum of products of creation and annihilation operators, with suitable non-singular coefficients, then the S -matrix will automatically satisfy a crucial physical requirement, the cluster decomposition principle, which says in effect that distant experiments yield uncorrelated results. Indeed, it is for this reason that the formalism of creation and annihilation operators is widely used in non-relativistic quantum statistical mechanics, where the number of particles is typically fixed.

DOI
10.1017/cbo9781139644167.006

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Up to this point we have not had much to say about the detailed structure of the Hamiltonian operator H . This operator can be defined by giving all its matrix elements between states with arbitrary numbers of particles. Equivalently, as we shall show here, any such operator may be expressed as a function of certain operators that create and destroy single particles. We saw in Chapter 1 that such creation and annihilation operators were first encountered in the canonical quantization of the electromagnetic field and other fields in the early days of quantum mechanics. They provided a natural formalism for theories in which massive particles as well as photons can be produced and destroyed, beginning in the early 1930s with Fermi's theory of beta decay. However, there is a deeper reason for constructing the Hamiltonian out of creation and annihilation operators, which goes beyond the need to quantize any pre-existing field theory like electrodynamics, and has nothing to do with whether particles can actually be produced or destroyed. The great advantage of this formalism is that if we express the Hamiltonian as a sum of products of creation and annihilation operators, with suitable non-singular coefficients, then the S -matrix will automatically satisfy a crucial physical requirement, the cluster decomposition principle, which says in effect that distant experiments yield uncorrelated results. Indeed, it is for this reason that the formalism of creation and annihilation operators is widely used in non-relativistic quantum statistical mechanics, where the number of particles is typically fixed.
This is a self-contained and hopefully readable account on the method of creation and annihilation operators (also known as the Fock space representation or the "second quantization" formalism) for non-relativistic quantum mechanics of many particles. Assuming knowledge only on conventional quantum mechanics in the wave function formalism, we define the creation and annihilation operators, discuss their properties, and introduce corresponding representations of states and operators of many-particle systems. As the title of the note suggests, we cover most topics treated in sections 6.7 and 6.8 of Feynman's "Statistical Mechanics: A Set of Lectures". As a preliminary, we also carefully discuss the symmetry of wave functions describing indistinguishable particles. We note that all the contents of the present note are completely standard, and the definitions and the derivations presented here have been known to many. Although the style of the present note may be slightly more mathematical than standard physics literatures, we do not try to achieve full mathematical rigor.(Note to experts: In particular we here DERIVE the (anti)commutation relations of the creation and annihilation operators, rather than simply declaring them. In this sense our approach is quite close to that of Feynman's. But we here focus on the action of creation/annihilation operators on general NNN body wave functions, while Feynman makes a heavy use of Slater-determinant-type states from the beginning. We hope that our presentation provides a better perspective on the formalism.)
This chapter describes a very elegant way of accounting for the symmetry of the states and the operators of systems of many identical particles and illustrates its use in a few simple calculations. It presents operators in identical particle systems that remove particles from and add particles to the system. This formal similarity is the reason the creation and annihilation operator formalism is called second quantization; one-particle wave functions appear to have become operators which create and annihilate particles, while single particle expectation values appear to have become operators for physical quantities. The Hanbury-Brown and Twiss experiment provides a simple way of observing this tendency of bosons to clump together. Basically, the experiment measures the probability of observing two photons simultaneously at different points in a beam of incoherent light. The actual measuring apparatus uses a half silvered mirror, to split the beam into some identical beams; this avoids the problem of one detector casting a shadow on the other.
Special relativity implies that mass can be created from energy — it implies particle production. A relativistic quantum theory is of necessity a theory of many particles. We shall therefore first describe systems of many identical particles but in the simpler context of non-relativistic theory. As we shall soon see, many-particle systems can be described by field operators that create and destroy particles, with these operators acting in a vastly enlarged vector space that spans states with an arbitrary number of particles, including a state of no particles — the vacuum state. Both Bose and Fermi statistics are handled in this way, and the resulting formalism is compact, convenient, and powerful. For the Bose case, the functional integral representation of the quantum many-particle system is direct generalization of the coherent-state functional integral developed in the previous chapter. To describe the analogous formulation for the Fermi case, we must first develop the theory of anticommuting variables. The power and utility of field operator and functional integral methods will be illustrated by applying it to systems in thermal equilibrium, first to free Fermi and Bose gases, and then to a model of liquid helium which exhibits the phenomenon of spontaneous symmetry breaking, a phenomenon of great importance in condensed matter physics as well as in elementary particle theory.
Nothing can be made out of nothing. William Shakespeare , King Lear Historically, quantization of the motion of particles was developed first. The state was described by a wave function and observables by operators. When dealing with interactions between particles and fields, such as the electromagnetic field, the fields were treated classically. Classical field equations look like the quantum mechanical equations for the wave function of the field quanta. For example, the Klein–Gordon classical field equation is similar to the quantum mechanical wave equation for a relativistic spinless particle. Quantizing the fields, leading to quantum field theory, appears to be quantizing a theory that has already been quantized; hence the name “second quantization.” In reality, there is only one quantization and one quantum theory. The method of second quantization is important in the study of many-particle systems. It enables us to express many-body operators in terms of creation and annihilation operators, thus rendering calculations less cumbersome. Moreover, the method makes it possible to treat systems with a variable number of particles; that is why the method initially emerged in the context of quantum field theory. In Chapter 1 we indicated that any one-particle wave function may be expanded in a complete set of states. In this chapter, we show that products of single-particle states, when properly symmetrized, form an orthonormal basis for the expansion of the wave function of an N -particle system.
Up to a point, the quantum theory developed in chapter 5 was quite general. However, the systems we had in mind were non-relativistic ones consisting of a fixed number of particles. In this chapter, we extend the theory to deal with systems in which the number of particles can change. There are several reasons for wanting to do this. The most obvious is that we need a method of describing high-energy scattering and decay processes in which particles can be created and destroyed. A second is that, when we try to make quantum theory consistent with special relativity, we encounter difficulties (discussed in chapter 7) that can be resolved only in this more general setting. The final reason is that, even for systems of non-relativistic particles, the mathematics rapidly becomes intractable as the number of particles increases. A useful device for dealing with large systems is, roughly speaking, to imagine adding an extra particle, which serves as a theoretical probe of the state of the system. To put the matter another way, the method of second quantization developed in this chapter provides a means of dealing with the entire system by considering only a few particles at a time.
In atomic, nuclear and particle physics we come across several situations where particles or radiation quanta (photons) are created or destroyed. For example in the beta decay of the neutron, a neutron is annihilated and a proton, electron and antineutrino are created. In some situations the interaction of radiation with matter can result in creation or annihilation of a pair of electron and positron. Such processes cannot be understood on the basis of (non-relativistic or relativistic) single particle wave equations because in such theories the probability ψ∗ψdτ (of finding the particle in the region of space dτ) when integrated over the whole space, results in unity at all times and so the existence of the particle is always guaranteed. Hence in the framework of single particle wave equation it is not possible to understand the creation or annihilation of particles. Even a simple process in which an atom undergoes a transition from an excited to the ground state by spontaneous emission of a photon in the absence of a perturbing electromagnetic field cannot be explained within this framework.