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The ladder operators of the quantum harmonic oscillator or the "number representation" of second quantization are just special cases of this fact. Ladder operators then become ubiquitous in quantum mechanics from the angular momentum operator, to coherent states and to discrete magnetic translation operators.
In simpler terms, the total angular momentum operator characterizes how a quantum system is changed when it is rotated. The relationship between angular momentum operators and rotation operators is the same as the relationship between Lie algebras and Lie groups in mathematics, as discussed further below. The different types of rotation ...
Another type of operator in quantum field theory, discovered in the early 1970s, is known as the anti-symmetric operator.This operator, similar to spin in non-relativistic quantum mechanics is a ladder operator that can create two fermions of opposite spin out of a boson or a boson from two fermions.
The total angular momentum operators can be shown to satisfy the very same commutation relations, [,] = , where k, l, m ∈ {x, y, z}. Indeed, the preceding construction is the standard method [ 4 ] for constructing an action of a Lie algebra on a tensor product representation.
Examples are the angular momentum of an electron in an atom, electronic spin, and the angular momentum of a rigid rotor. In all cases, the three operators satisfy the following commutation relations, [,] =, [,] =, [,] =, where i is the purely imaginary number and the Planck constant ħ has been set equal to one. The Casimir operator
The two operators together are called ladder operators. Given any energy eigenstate, we can act on it with the lowering operator, a , to produce another eigenstate with ħω less energy. By repeated application of the lowering operator, it seems that we can produce energy eigenstates down to E = −∞ .
Classically we have for the angular momentum =. This is the same in quantum mechanics considering and as operators. Classically, an infinitesimal rotation of the vector = (,,) about the -axis to ′ = (′, ′,) leaving unchanged can be expressed by the following infinitesimal translations (using Taylor approximation):
between the position operator x and momentum operator p x in the x direction of a point particle in one dimension, where [x, p x] = x p x − p x x is the commutator of x and p x , i is the imaginary unit, and ℏ is the reduced Planck constant h/2π, and is the unit operator. In general, position and momentum are vectors of operators and their ...