5: Matter Waves
- Page ID
- 94046
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- 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.