Students calculate probabilities for a particle on a ring using three different notations: Dirac bra-ket, matrix, and wave function. After calculating the angular momentum and energy measurement probabilities, students compare their calculation methods for notation.

Students calculate probabilities for energy, angular momentum, and position as a function of time for an initial state that is a linear combination of energy/angular momentum eigenstates for a particle confined to a ring written in bra-ket notation. This activity helps students build an understanding of when they can expect a quantity to depend on time and to give them more practice moving between representations.

Students calculate probabilities for a particle on a ring whose wavefunction is not easily separated into eigenstates by inspection. To find the energy, angular momentum, and position probabilities, students perform integrations with the wavefunction or decompose the wavefunction into a superposition of eigenfunctions.

Students calculate the expectation value of energy and angular momentum as a function of time for an initial state for a particle on a ring. This state is a linear combination of energy/angular momentum eigenstates written in bra-ket notation.

For \(\ell=1\), the operators that measure the three components of angular momentum in matrix notation are given by: \begin{align} L_x&=\frac{\hbar}{\sqrt{2}}\left( \begin{matrix} 0&1&0\\ 1&0&1\\ 0&1&0 \end{matrix} \right)\\ L_y&=\frac{\hbar}{\sqrt{2}}\left( \begin{matrix} 0&-i&0\\ i&0&-i\\ 0&i&0 \end{matrix} \right)\\ L_z&=\;\;\;\hbar\left( \begin{matrix} 1&0&0\\ 0&0&0\\ 0&0&-1 \end{matrix} \right) \end{align}

Show that:

1. Find the commutator of \(L_x\) and \(L_y\).
2. Find the matrix representation of \(L^2=L_x^2+L_y^2+L_z^2\).
3. Find the matrix representations of the raising and lowering operators \(L_{\pm}=L_x\pm iL_y\). (Notice that \(L_{\pm}\) are NOT Hermitian and therefore cannot represent observables. They are used as a tool to build one quantum state from another.)
4. Show that \([L_z, L_{\pm}]=\lambda L_{\pm}\). Find \(\lambda\). Interpret this expression as an eigenvalue equation. What is the operator?
5. Let \(L_{+}\) act on the following three states given in matrix representation. \begin{equation} \left|{1,1}\right\rangle =\left( \begin{matrix} 1\\0\\0 \end{matrix} \right)\qquad \left|{1,0}\right\rangle =\left( \begin{matrix} 0\\1\\0 \end{matrix} \right)\qquad \left|{1,-1}\right\rangle =\left( \begin{matrix} 0\\0\\1 \end{matrix} \right) \end{equation} Why is \(L_{+}\) called a “raising operator”?

Instructor's Guide

Introduction

This activity is meant to lay the foundation of what raising and lowering oporators are and how they can be used. This material will become very important for students' study of symmetry matrices in PH427 and the Quantum Harmonic Oscillator in the Quantum Capstone.

Student Conversations

At this stage, students will not have seen commutators or done much matrix multiplication in a while, so students may progress lower here than you'd expect. It will be important for the teaching team to be on the look out for groups that are confused at the beginning since some will forget that a commutator can have the form \([A,B]=AB-BA\), which is necessary to progress.

Making sure the teaching team has a good handle on the results of each calculation so they can help trouble shoot errors made during matrix multiplication which are hard to catch in the act and usually can most easilty be inferred from an erronous result (which the students themselves won't usually recognize).

Wrap-up

It is a good idea to reinforce the patterns seen in orbital angular momentum to their experiences with spin angular momentum, such as that cross product-like relationship between commutators of cartesian directed angular momenta. Then it becomes easy to contrast those patterns with that of the raising and lower operators and emphasize that these are not observables which correspond to measures of angular momentum but a different object entirely.

While their importance should be emphasized for study of periodic systems and the quantum harmonic oscilator, it should also be mentioned these operators will not be a major focus of this course or our study of the Hydrogen atom as we head into the home stretch of the course. This content is largely a very important detour.

• Outer products yield projection operators
• Projection operators are idempotes (they square to themselves)
• A complete set of outer products of an orthonormal basis is the identity (a completeness relation)

This activity allows students to puzzle through indexing, the from of operators in quantum mechanics, and working with the new quantum numbers on the sphere in an applied context.

The instructor and students do a skit where students represent quantum states that are “measured” by the instructor resulting in a state collapse.

Students are asked to:

• Test to see if one of the given functions is an eigenfunction of the given operator
• See if they can write the functions that are found not to be eigenfunctions as a linear combination of eigenfunctions.

This activity reinforces the strategies students have been practicing on each system by letting them create their own matrix operators and columns on the hydrogen atom and do some calculations with them.