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Fock Spaces PDF

The document discusses fermionic Fock space, which describes systems of identical fermionic particles. It introduces Vladimir Fock, who developed Fock space and related concepts in quantum mechanics. Fock space is constructed by taking the direct sum of Hilbert spaces for different particle numbers, from zero particles up to some maximum number M. Within each particle number sector, the many-body wave functions are either fully symmetric or fully antisymmetric representations of the permutation group, corresponding to bosons and fermions respectively.

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Azhar Mahmood
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216 views7 pages

Fock Spaces PDF

The document discusses fermionic Fock space, which describes systems of identical fermionic particles. It introduces Vladimir Fock, who developed Fock space and related concepts in quantum mechanics. Fock space is constructed by taking the direct sum of Hilbert spaces for different particle numbers, from zero particles up to some maximum number M. Within each particle number sector, the many-body wave functions are either fully symmetric or fully antisymmetric representations of the permutation group, corresponding to bosons and fermions respectively.

Uploaded by

Azhar Mahmood
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© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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The Fermionic Fock Space

Vladimir Aleksandrovich Fock (18981974) was a Soviet physicist, who did foundational work on quantum mechanics.

His primary scientific contribution lies in the development of quantum physics, although he also contributed significantly to the fields of mechanics, theoretical optics, theory of gravitation, physics of continuous medium. In 1926 he generalized the Klein-Gordon equation. He gave his name to Fock space [Z. Phys.,75 (1932) 622], the Fock representation and Fock state, and developed the HartreeFock method in 1930. Fock was a professor at Saint Petersburg State University

Many-fermion operators and permutational symmetry


Let us start from the Hamiltonian operator:

Kinetic energy term

Interaction with external field

Two-body (pairwise) interaction

one-particle operators (sums of contributions from individual particles) single-particle degrees of freedom

describes self-interaction. If such a term exists, it can always be included in V1 Three-body interaction:

Exchange operators
- exchanges particles i and j

is hermitian and unitary:

eigenvalues of

are

(identical particles cannot be distinguished) For identical particles, measurements performed on quantum states and have to yield identical results A principle, supported by experiment This principle implies that all mmany-body wave functions are eigenstates of

is a basis of one-dimensional representation of the permutation group There are only two one-dimensional representations of the permutation group: for all i,j - fully symmetric representation for all i,j - fully antisymmetric representation

Consequently, systems of identical particles form two separate classes: bosons (integer spins) fermions (half-integer spins)
For spin-statistics theorem, see W. Pauli, Phys. Rev. 58, 716-722(1940)

Many-body space

One-particle (single-particle, s.p.) basis


Dimension of the s.p. space (can be infinite) The corresponding Hilbert space is called - one particle Hilbert space.

On the level of it is irrelevant whether one is dealing with fermions or bosons. However, this is not the case for a two-particle space

Two-particle space
tensor product, has a product basis

Is this wave function a good candidate for a two-particle state?

NO!
but

is a basis in The above state can also be written as:

labels all permutations There are

"M% $ ' #2&

such states!

How to generalize this result for the A-particle case?

A-particle space

A-times

p - permutation of A elements:

a Slater determinant spanned by one-particle states! There are

"M% $ ' # A&

such states!

There is only one state for A=M (why?) In addition to 1-, 2-, M-particle space, there also exists a vacuum space, containing only one state, ! a vacuum. One cannot associate a wave function with the vacuum space (a function of no arguments?)

Fock space
A Hilbert space being a sum of all many-body spaces:

One can now talk about wave functions which do not have a fixed number of particles! Dimension:

"M% "M% "M% "M% M $ ' + $ ' + $ ' + K$ ' = 2 #0& #1& #2& #M&

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