In this chapter we shall examine different ways in which one can represent the evolution of a quantum state. While mathematically different, the various representations are equivalent in that, at the end of the day, one obtains the same physical prediction. This is good because physics and physical measurements should not depend upon how one chooses to represent the quantum state. Depending upon the problem at hand, each representation has its unique advantages and disadvantages.
In this chapter we shall examine different ways in which one can represent the evolution of a quantum state. While mathematically different, the various representations are equivalent in that, at the end of the day, one obtains the same physical prediction. This is good because physics and physical measurements should not depend upon how one chooses to represent the quantum state. Depending upon the problem at hand, each representation has its unique advantages and disadvantages.
The Unitary Dynamical Group in Schrödinger's Picture Up to now we have been concerned with the description of a physical system at a fixed instant of time. The time evolution of quantum systems constitutes a many-faced, wide issue which, however, is somewhat tangential to the main aim of this volume. We shall touch upon it only briefly, restricting ourselves to the more familiar aspects of the problem. We assume, to begin with, that the physical system has no superselection rules, so that states and physical quantities correspond one-to-one to density operators and self-adjoint operators, respectively, on the Hilbert space. To describe the dynamical evolution of the system one has to specify the way the representatives of states and physical quantities evolve in, which is fixed in time, since the physical system is supposed to preserve its identity. There is an old tenet according to which there are two kinds of time evolution: the discontinuous, nondeterministic evolution undergone by the quantum system when a measurement is made on it, and the continuous, deterministic evolution caused by the interaction with external forces or with other quantum systems. The first kind of evolution will be dealt with in Chapter 8, where we shall find it less alarming than is often claimed.
In general, the expectation values of observable quantities depend on time. In quantum mechanics, these values are given by the expression: < X >t=< A(t)|X(t)|A(t) >. (10.1) There is an intrinsic ambiguity in determining the time dependence on the various elements (bra, ket and operator) which comprise the right hand side of equation (10.1) because we can transfer this dependence from one element to another, while keeping unchanged the expectation value < X >t, which is all we can measure on the system. The ambiguity gives rise to different descriptions of the motion, connected to unitary time-dependent transformations, thus equivalent to each other. In the following sections, we describe the Schro¨dinger and Heisenberg representations. Subsequently we will introduce a third description of the motion or interactions: the Dirac representation, also called the interaction representation, which is particularly useful in the case of weakly interacting systems.
Chapter 8 is devoted to the study of the dynamics of quantum systems, based on the formalism presented in Chapter 7 and previous chapters. The operator notation and its matrix representation are used without distinction, moving freely from one to the other as convenient. This allows us to study the evolution of the system from different perspectives, depending on the description adopted. The chapter includes a discussion of the statistical information contained in the quantum formalism, a formal derivation of the Heisenberg inequalities and a clarification of their physical meaning. A section is dedicated to quantum canonical and related transformations. More advanced topics, which provide a valuable complement, include Noether’s theorem on the relationship between the symmetry properties and the conserved dynamical variables of the system.
In the first two chapters we have examined the basic principles – superposition (p. 18), complementarity (p. 19), quantization (p. 44), statistical algorithm (p. 57), and correspondence (p. 72) (see also Subsec. 2.3.4) – and the basic entities, observables and states, of quantum mechanics, as well as the main differences with respect to classical mechanics. While what we have discussed so far is rather a static picture of observables and states, in this chapter we shall deal with quantum dynamics, i.e. with the time evolution of quantum-mechanical systems. Historically, after Bohr had provided a quantized description of the atom (see Subsec. 1.5.4), Einstein showed the quantized nature of photons (see Subsec. 1.2.1), and de Broglie hypothized the wave-like nature of matter (see Subsec. 1.5.5), the first building block of quantum mechanics was provided by the commutation relations, proposed by Heisenberg in 1925, whose consequence is represented by the uncertainty relation (see Subsec. 2.2.7 and Sec. 2.3). This was the subject of the previous chapters. The dynamical part of the theory was proposed by Schrödinger in 1926, and is known as the Schrödinger equation. It is also known as wave mechanics (see Subsec. 1.5.7). In this chapter we shall show that Heisenberg's and Schrödinger's formulations are only two different aspects of the same theory. We shall also come back to this point in Sec. 8.1.1. Here, first we shall derive the fundamental equation which rules quantum dynamics (Sec. 3.1), and, in Sec. 3.2, we shall summarize the main properties of the Schrödinger equation.
Classical reality is described in terms of objects and things and their mutual relationships. On the other hand, in the case of quantum reality, the collapse of the state in an interaction assigns a unique position to the observer. These two disparate views are based on different logics of representation. In this paper, we first summarize the early evolution of these ideas and then go beyond the implicit dependence of the quantum theory framework on the mathematical apparatus of calculus and vector spaces, by delving one layer deeper to an information-theoretic understanding of symbol representation. We examine some epistemic implications of the fact that, mathematically, e-symbol representation is optimal and 3 symbols are more efficient that 2 symbols, and this optimality leads to the idea that space itself is e-dimensional, and not 3-dimensional. We also discuss the principle of veiled nonlocality as a way to understand the split between the observer and the physical process.