4: Identical Particles
These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
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- 4.3: Second Quantization
- In the usual tensor product notation, symmetric and antisymmetric states become quite cumbersome to deal with when the number of particles is large. We will now introduce a formalism called second quantization, which greatly simplifies manipulations of such multi-particle states. (The reason for the name “second quantization” will not be apparent until later; it is a bad name, but one we are stuck with for historical reasons.)