Published In
Journal for Foundations and Applications of Physics
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
8-2020
Subjects
Density matrices, Quantum theory, Quantum mechanics
Abstract
We clarify certain confusions in the literature of the density operator in quantum mechanics, and demonstrate that the quantum Liouville theorem has the same form in both the Schrodinger and the Heisenberg pictures. Our starting point is to treat the density operator as an observable which has its specific time dependence in each of the two pictures. It is further shown that such a formulation will provide the exact correspondence between classical and quantum statistical mechanics with the Liouville theorem being interpreted as a conservation law, which is derivable from the equation of motion only in the quantum case.
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/33744
Citation Details
P. T. Leung and G. J. Ni, 2020, " A New Look at the Quantum Liouville Theorem " J. Found. Appl. Phys. 7: 25-31
Description
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.