Physics 3220, Fall '96. HINTS for Homework #9 (Due Wed, Oct 29)

Almost all of the "proofs" and "show thats" this week are not meant to be hard! Many are only one (or two) liners!

Remember some basic features of Hermiticity:

For ANY operator O, the Hermitian adjoint is defined by (for all vectors psi and phi).

A consequence of the above is that if c is the operator "multiply by c",

(c is just some complex constant) then . (Convince yourself that this follows from the above!!)

If O is Hermitian, then .

For ANY operator O, it's true that , and ,

and . (Can you PROVE this last one? That would make a lovely exam question!)

If O is represented by a matrix, then

(In words, the Hermitian adjoint is the conjugate of the transpose)

#5) "Find the eigenvectors and eigenvalues of O" means solve the equation , where u is a vector, i.e. .

(You should find two non-trivial eigenvalues in this problem)

Normalizing a vector means , or writing out components in gory detail:


Back to this week's homework.