- #1
phyky
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if 2 hermitian operator A, B is commute, then AB=BA, the expectation value <.|AB|.>=<.|BA|.>. how about if A and B is non commute operator? so we can not calculate the exp value <.|AB|.> or <.|BA|.>?
if 2 hermitian operator A, B is commute, then AB=BA, the expectation value <.|AB|.>=<.|BA|.>. how about if A and B is non commute operator? so we can not calculate the exp value <.|AB|.> or <.|BA|.>?
We can compute both, they just won't be equal.
In some cases (when the commutation is a projector to a particular eigen space) they might be equal.
We can compute both, they just won't be equal.
Then the expectation is zero. Both operators map from Hilbert Space to Hilbert Space in this context. And you can always take an inner product between two vectors in Hilbert Space. They might be orthogonal, because they belong to different sub-spaces, but then the inner product is trivially zero and that's your expectation value.Generally we can't, because if the vector psi is in Dom(AB), it may not be in Dom(BA).
conclusion is if AB is non commute. we can only compute 1 of the expectation value, either <|AB|> or <|BA|>?