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This set of activities explores completeness relations in quantum mechanics and how they eventually support understanding of wavefunctions and what it means to be in the position or momentum representatations.

Activities

Students work in small groups to use completeness relations to change the basis of quantum states.
Students practice using inner products to find the components of the cartesian basis vectors in the polar basis and vice versa. Then, students use a completeness relation to change bases or cartesian/polar bases and for different spin bases.

Small Group Activity

30 min.

Completeness Relations
Students use a completeness relations to write hydrogen atoms states in the energy and position bases.
Students use completeness relations to write a matrix element of a spin component in a different basis.
Students use the completeness relation for the position basis to re-express expressions in bra/ket notation in wavefunction notation.

Small Group Activity

30 min.

\(|\pm\rangle\) Forms an Orthonormal Basis
Student explore the properties of an orthonormal basis using the Cartesian and \(S_z\) bases as examples.
In this lecture, the instructor guides a discussion about translating between bra-ket notation and wavefunction notation for quantum systems.
Students consider the dimensions of spin-state kets and position-basis kets.

Small Group Activity

30 min.

Outer Product of a Vector on Itself
Students compute the outer product of a vector on itself to product a projection operator. Students discover that projection operators are idempotent (square to themselves) and that a complete set of outer products of an orthonormal basis is the identity (a completeness relation).