Sunday, October 5, 2008

Platypus Cricket Ball Speed Sensor

The classical limit of quantum wave function

One way to understand that the wave function of quantum mechanics has no classical limit is taken equal to 0 ± so naive in the Schrödinger equation. Immediately there was a contradiction since the kinetic term disappears before potential. This implies that the wave function does not have an expansion in powers of h around a classical function.

To be a little more concrete, consider the Schrödinger equation for stationary states of a particle potential V (x). The Schrödinger equation is reduced to H ψ = E ψ, where the Hamiltonian H = H_0 + H_i has two terms: one describes the kinetic energy of the particle H_0 =- h ^ 2 / (2m) ^ 2 d ^ 2/dx and other interactions with the potential H_i = V (x). So naive it seems to take h = 0 means to suppress the kinetic term. It follows that V (x) ψ = E ψ, ie V (x) = E which is impossible since any potential depends on x is not equal to a constant E.

The correct way to take a semi-classical limit of the wave function is what is called the WKB approximation. The central idea is to understand that the wave function has an essential singularity as h tends to 0. That is, ψ (x) ~ A (x) e ^ (i B (x) / h), where A (x) and B (x) do have expansions around classical values \u200b\u200b±. But the singularity in the exponential limit makes it impossible to naive. This approach allows a simple way to estimate such subtle phenomena such as tunneling.

obstruction to have a classical limit for the wave function implies that there is a classic description of the information in a system equivalent to the quantum paradigm. If that were true, would have a quantum-classical mechanics, profoundly different from the Newtonian concepts. The ideas of superposition and quantum entanglement are as consistently guarded by these singular limits.

0 comments:

Post a Comment