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This operator occurs in relativistic quantum field theory, such as the Dirac equation and other relativistic wave equations, since energy and momentum combine into the 4-momentum vector above, momentum and energy operators correspond to space and time derivatives, and they need to be first order partial derivatives for Lorentz covariance.
Momentum space is the set of all momentum vectors p a physical system can have; the momentum vector of a particle corresponds to its motion, with dimension of mass ⋅ length ⋅ time −1. Mathematically, the duality between position and momentum is an example of Pontryagin duality .
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 ...
In quantum mechanics, the position operator is the operator that corresponds to the position observable of a particle. When the position operator is considered with a wide enough domain (e.g. the space of tempered distributions ), its eigenvalues are the possible position vectors of the particle.
The Ehrenfest theorem, named after Austrian theoretical physicist Paul Ehrenfest, relates the time derivative of the expectation values of the position and momentum operators x and p to the expectation value of the force = ′ on a massive particle moving in a scalar potential (), [1]
Due to linearity, vectors can be defined in any number of dimensions, as each component of the vector acts on the function separately. One mathematical example is the del operator, which is itself a vector (useful in momentum-related quantum operators, in the table below). An operator in n-dimensional space can be written:
The set of position and momentum coordinates (,) are called canonical coordinates. (See Hamiltonian mechanics for more background.) The time evolution of Hamilton's equations is a symplectomorphism, meaning that it conserves the symplectic 2-form. A numerical scheme is a symplectic integrator if it also conserves this 2-form.
Specifically, the position and momentum operators in quantum mechanics, usually denoted and , satisfy the canonical commutation relation: [,] = where is the identity operator. It follows that X {\displaystyle X} and P {\displaystyle P} commute with their commutator.