Measuring the variances of Heisenberg's incompatible observables
Monday, January 5, 2015 - 06:00
in Physics & Chemistry
In the quantum world, the famous Heisenberg uncertainty principle bounds the product of the variances of two incompatible observables such as the position and the momentum of a particle by the Planck constant. Heisenberg, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, gave only an intuitive formulation of this principle, using thought experiments. Later, the uncertainty relation was generalized by Robertson for general observables and it was proved that the product of the variances of two incompatible observables is bounded by their commutator (a quantity that gives the difference between two physical observables when multiplied in succession).