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CRC Press eBooks

- Creation and Annihilation Operators in Fock Space

Girish S. Setlur

Published Dec 5, 2013• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In this chapter, we discuss the notion of creation and annihilation operators. These operators correspond to addition or removal of excitations of a system of particles or particles themselves. We show that these operators may be used to rewrite manybody Hamiltonians in a compact form where information about Bose or Fermi statistics is encoded in the Hamiltonian itself, which greatly reduces the effort required in studying its properties.

DOI
10.1201/b16133-13

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Chapter 2

Second Quantization

In this chapter we introduce the many-body Hamiltonian for the N -electron system and rewrite it in terms of annihilation and creation operators. This rewriting is called second quantization. We introduce the canonical and the grand canonical ensemble which is the framework in which quantum statistical mechanics has to be formulated. By considering the ideal Fermi gas, we try to motivate that the grand canonical ensemble may be more practical for computations than the canonical ensemble.

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Generalization of the Cook Formalism for Fock Space

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The Cook formalism for Fock space is extended by finding additional properties of the creation and annihilation operators and by giving a rigorous definition of the second-quantized form for n-body operators (for any n). Properties of these second-quantized operators are given, including an expansion in terms of the creation and annihilation operators.

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THE CLUSTER DECOMPOSITION PRINCIPLE

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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.

Cambridge University Press eBooks•Jun 30, 1995•0 citations
In this chapter, we discuss the notion of creation and annihilation operators. These operators correspond to addition or removal of excitations of a system of particles or particles themselves. We show that these operators may be used to rewrite manybody Hamiltonians in a compact form where information about Bose or Fermi statistics is encoded in the Hamiltonian itself, which greatly reduces the effort required in studying its properties.
Abstract We propose a new generalization of the standard (anti-)commutation relations for creation and annihilation operators of bosons and fermions. These relations preserve the usual symmetry properties of bosons and fermions. Only the standard (anti-)commutator relation involving one creation and one annihilation operator is deformed by introducing fractional coefficients, containing a positive integer parameterp. The Fock space is determined by the classical definition. The new relations are chosen in such a way that the total occupation number in the system has the maximum valuep. From the actions of creation and annihilation operators in the Fock space, a group theoretical framework is determined, and from here the correspondence with known particle statistics is established.
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.)
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.