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Concept
Heisenberg picture
Summary
In physics, the Heisenberg picture or Heisenberg representation is a formulation (largely due to Werner Heisenberg in 1925) of quantum mechanics in which the operators (observables and others) incorporate a dependency on time, but the state vectors are time-independent, an arbitrary fixed basis rigidly underlying the theory.
It stands in contrast to the Schrödinger picture in which the operators are constant, instead, and the states evolve in time. The two pictures only differ by a basis change with respect to time-dependency, which corresponds to the difference between active and passive transformations. The Heisenberg picture is the formulation of matrix mechanics in an arbitrary basis, in which the Hamiltonian is not necessarily diagonal.
It further serves to define a third, hybrid, picture, the interaction picture.
In the Heisenberg picture of quantum mechanics the state vectors |ψ⟩ do not change with time, while observables A satisfy
where "H" and "S" label observables in Heisenberg and Schrödinger picture respectively, H is the Hamiltonian and [·,·] denotes the commutator of two operators (in this case H and A). Taking expectation values automatically yields the Ehrenfest theorem, featured in the correspondence principle.
By the Stone–von Neumann theorem, the Heisenberg picture and the Schrödinger picture are unitarily equivalent, just a basis change in Hilbert space. In some sense, the Heisenberg picture is more natural and convenient than the equivalent Schrödinger picture, especially for relativistic theories. Lorentz invariance is manifest in the Heisenberg picture, since the state vectors do not single out the time or space.
This approach also has a more direct similarity to classical physics: by simply replacing the commutator above by the Poisson bracket, the Heisenberg equation reduces to an equation in Hamiltonian mechanics.
For the sake of pedagogy, the Heisenberg picture is introduced here from the subsequent, but more familiar, Schrödinger picture.
Official source
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