Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Quantum number
Summary
In quantum physics and chemistry, quantum numbers describe values of conserved quantities in the dynamics of a quantum system. Quantum numbers correspond to eigenvalues of operators that commute with the Hamiltonian—quantities that can be known with precision at the same time as the system's energy—and their corresponding eigenspaces. Together, a specification of all of the quantum numbers of a quantum system fully characterize a basis state of the system, and can in principle be measured together.
An important aspect of quantum mechanics is the quantization of many observable quantities of interest. In particular, this leads to quantum numbers that take values in discrete sets of integers or half-integers; although they could approach infinity in some cases. This distinguishes quantum mechanics from classical mechanics where the values that characterize the system such as mass, charge, or momentum, all range continuously. Quantum numbers often describe specifically the energy levels of electrons in atoms, but other possibilities include angular momentum, spin, etc. An important family is flavour quantum numbers – internal quantum numbers which determine the type of a particle and its interactions with other particles through the fundamental forces. Any quantum system can have one or more quantum numbers; it is thus difficult to list all possible quantum numbers.
Quantum system
The tally of quantum numbers varies from system to system and has no universal answer. Hence these parameters must be found for each system to be analyzed. A quantized system requires at least one quantum number. The dynamics (i.e. time evolution) of any quantum system are described by a quantum operator in the form of a Hamiltonian, H. There is one quantum number of the system corresponding to the system's energy; i.e., one of the eigenvalues of the Hamiltonian. There is also one quantum number for each linearly independent operator O that commutes with the Hamiltonian. A complete set of commuting observables (CSCO) that commute with the Hamiltonian characterizes the system with all its quantum numbers.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.