5: Matter Waves

Physics 9HC: Introduction to Waves, Physical Optics, and Quantum Theory · LibreTexts

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    From LibreTexts, under CC BY-SA 4.0, as the source states it; its equations are written in TeX, which the PDF shows typeset. This page at LibreTexts.

    • 5.1: The Schrödinger Wave Equation
      We have a wave equation for light, and light behaves like a particle, so we might expect that the wave equation for particles like electrons would be the same.  But it turns out that photons having zero mass and electrons having non-zero mass leads to fundamentally different wave equations for these two entities.
    • 5.2: States of Definite Energy
      Our old trick of separation of variables reveals that the time evolution of a quantum state (i.e. how probabilities of measurements change with time) is related to whether the measurement of the energy of that state is a fixed number or is probabilistic.
    • 5.3: Operators and Observables
      We have a special set of mathematical tools called operators that allow us to extract information from quantum states. Sometimes these operators give us a single, exact number, and other times they provide us with probabilities for various measurements.
    • 5.4: Eigenstates and Eigenvalues
      We use our new operators to do some calculations that predict observable averages and uncertainties.

    This page titled 5: Matter Waves was last modified on Wed, 27 Mar 2024 18:15:29 GMT and is shared under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Tom Weideman.