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Physical Observables

Physical observables are represented by linear, hermitian operators that act on the vectors of the Hilbert space. If A is such an operator, and tex2html_wrap_inline261 is an arbitrary vector in the Hilbert space, then A might act on tex2html_wrap_inline261 to produce a vector tex2html_wrap_inline267 , which we express as

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Since tex2html_wrap_inline261 is representable as a column vector, A is representable as a matrix with components

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The condition that A must be hermitian means that

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or

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Mark Tuckerman
Wed Mar 10 13:14:21 EST 1999