This chapter discusses everything in terms of wave functions and describes the choice between active and passive rotations. It defines the representations of the rotation group by means of the abstract state vectors and by means of wave functions. That implies that the rotations are active rotations. The chapter finds that for a sequence of rotations the three-dimensional matrices have the property. It considers the change of the wave function in active and passive rotations respectively. In the active interpretation the physical system — characterized in space by the wave function — is bodily rotated. In the passive interpretation the frame of reference is rotated, whereas P and the local physical state at P remain unchanged. The chapter describes that there is a description which uses the new coordinates but describes the old situation.
This chapter discusses everything in terms of wave functions and describes the choice between active and passive rotations. It defines the representations of the rotation group by means of the abstract state vectors and by means of wave functions. That implies that the rotations are active rotations. The chapter finds that for a sequence of rotations the three-dimensional matrices have the property. It considers the change of the wave function in active and passive rotations respectively. In the active interpretation the physical system — characterized in space by the wave function — is bodily rotated. In the passive interpretation the frame of reference is rotated, whereas P and the local physical state at P remain unchanged. The chapter describes that there is a description which uses the new coordinates but describes the old situation.
There are unfortunately a large variety of possibilities for writing down a rotation; also there are two different interpretations of the word ‘rotation’. Obviously, if one rotates first the coordinate frame and then, by the same rotation, the space, all points will obtain again the same coordinate as before these rotations; the same is true in the reverse order. Rotational invariance means then that the result of this rotation, seen by an observer who did not participate in the rotation, is again a possible state of the unrotated system. One says the rotations in the physical three-dimensional space induce unitary transformations in the Hilbert space, whose matrices give rise to (infinitely many independent) representations of the rotation group. The active interpretation means carrying out the sequence of rotations using a fixed system of rotation axes; the passive interpretation means carrying out the rotations using a system of rotation axes which participates in the rotation.
As in classical mechanics, rotation in quantum mechanics is a transformation which deals with angular momentum. The difference with classical mechanics comes from the fact that angular momentum is a vector operator and not a usual vector and its components do not commute. As for any transformation in quantum mechanics, to each rotation we can associate an operator which acts in state space. The expression of this operator depends on whether the rotation is passive, that is we do a rotation of the coordinate axes and the physical system is left unchanged, or active, in which case the coordinate axes are unchanged and the rotation is performed on the physical system. In the first part (Chaps. 1 and 2) of this book, details concerning both aspects are given. Following the definition of the geometrical transformation associated with the most general rotation, we give the expression of the rotation operator for specific cases. Transformation laws for scalar fields, vector fields and spinor fields are given as well as transformation laws for scalar operators, vector operators and more generally, for operators of any rank. The second part (Chaps. 3 and 4) deals with angular momentum algebra. We define the coupling coefficients of 2, 3 and 4 angular momenta as well as the recoupling coefficients. The definition of the irreductible tensor operator, which is a generalisation of scalar and vector operators, is given as well as the Wigner-Eckart theorem. The application of this theorem to more complex cases is studied.
Spin is what makes the world go 'round. The Groups SO (3) and SU (2) How does SU(2) act on its Lie algebra? For physical and mathematical motivation for this section (which involves nonrelativistic quantum mechanics) we refer the reader to some remarks of Feynman and of Weyl. Specifically, Feynman, in his section entitled “Degeneracy,” shows that a process involving a specific choice of direction in space requires that the process be described not by a single wave function ψ but rather by a multicomponent column vector of wave functions Ψ = (ψ 1 , …, ψ N ) T . He then indicates, roughly speaking, that since the physics cannot depend on the choice of cartesian coordinates ( x 1 , x 2 , x 3 ) of space, the N -tuples must transform under some representation ρ: SO (3) → U ( N ) of the rotation group SO (3) of space. This is not quite accurate; since e i γ Ψ represents the same wave function (when γ is a constant), ρ is only a “ray” representation, ρ( g )ρ( h ) = e i γ( g,h ) ρ( gh ) for a function γ( g, h ). Weyl shows that this can be made into a genuine representation, except that it is (perhaps) double-valued. We shall show in this section that there is a natural 2 : 1 homomorphism π of the special unitary group SU (2) onto SO (3), thus yielding a (perhaps double valued) representation of SU (2) into U ( N ).
The spatially-temporal structure which we are going to introduce is a distinctive feature in the description of mechanical objects. In classical mechanics the motion of point masses is described in a frame of reference which consists of a spatial Cartesian coordinate system and a clock. The distinguished class is formed by the so called inertial frames which are characterized by the property that a free point mass performs uniform rectilinear motion with respect to such a frame. It follows that the coordinates (ξ, τ) and (ξ′, τ′) of a point mass in any two inertial frames of reference are related by the Galilei transformation 3.1.1 ξ′=Rξ+x+vτ,τ′+τ+t, where R is an orthogonal matrix (rotation) which describes the orientation of the new spatial axes with respect to the old ones, x is the vector of the spatial shift of the origin, ν is the relative velocity, and τ is the time shift showing the difference between the readings of the two clocks.
We have seen in the previous chapter how useful wave mechanics can be in solving physical problems. But wave mechanics has several limitations. It describes physical states by means of wave functions, which are functions of the positions of the particles of the system, but why should we single out position as the fundamental physical observable? For instance, we might want to describe states in terms of probability amplitudes for particles to have certain values of the momentum or energy rather than the position. A more fundamental limitation is that there are attributes of physical systems that cannot be described at all in terms of the positions and momenta of a set of particles. One of these attributes is spin , which will be a chief subject of Chapter 4. Another is the value of the electric or magnetic field at some point in space, treated in Chapter 11. This chapter will describe the principles of quantum mechanics in a formalism which is essentially the “transformation theory” of Dirac, mentioned briefly in Section 1.4. This formalism generalizes both the wave mechanics of Schrödinger and the matrix mechanics of Heisenberg, and is sufficiently comprehensive to apply to any sort of physical system. States The first postulate of quantum mechanics is that physical states can be represented as vectors in a sort of abstract space known as Hilbert space . Before getting into Hilbert space, I need to say a bit about vectors in general. In kindergarten we learn that vectors are quantities with both magnitude and direction. Later, when we study analytic geometry, we learn instead to describe a vector in d dimensions as a string of d numbers, the components of the vector. The latter approach lends itself well to calculation, but in some respects the kindergarten version is better, because it allows us to describe relations among vectors without specifying a coordinate system. For instance, a statement that one vector is parallel to a second vector, or perpendicular to a third, has nothing to do with how we choose our coordinate system. Here we will formulate what we mean by vector spaces in general, and Hilbert space in particular, in a way that is independent of the coordinates we use to describe directions in these spaces.
To lay a foundation for the study and use of rotation operators in graduate quantum mechanics and in research, a thorough discussion is presented of rotations in Euclidean three space (R3 ) and of their effect on kets in the Hilbert space of a single particle. The Wigner D-matrices are obtained and used to rotate spherical harmonics. An extensive ready-reference appendix of the properties of these matrices, expressed in a consistent notation, is provided. Careful attention is paid throughout to various conventions (e.g. active versus passive viewpoints) that are used in the literature.