Wednesday, August 19, 2015

quantum mechanics - How does wave function collapse when I measure position?


Text books say that when you measure a particle's position, its wave function collapses to one eigenstate, which is a delta function at that location. I'm confused here.




  1. A measurement always have limited accuracy. Does the wave function collapse to exactly a eigenstate no matter what accuracy I have?




  2. When a particle is in an eigenstate of position, I can represent the state in momentum basis, and calculate it's expected value (average) of kinetic energy. This gives me infinity. Can a particle ever be in such a state?






Answer





  1. No, it doesn't collapse to an eigenstate. Collapse to an eigenstate is a picture of an ideal measurement. In general the final state will not be describable by a wave function, because it's not a pure state, it is instead a mixed state. See this question, which is about inexact measurements.




  2. Position eigenstate in position representation is $\langle x_{}|x_0\rangle=\delta(x-x_0)$. This gives the following in the momentum representation: $\langle p_{}|x_0\rangle=e^{\frac{i}{\hbar}px}$. For this function probability density is constant, thus its expectation value is undefined (one can't find a center of infinite line). Similarly, for free particle expectation value of energy will also be undefined. This is because such state is an abstraction, a useful mathematical tool. Of course, such states can't be prepared in real experiment, but one can come very close to it, e.g. shoot an electron at a tiny slit and observe state of the electron at the very exit of that slit.




As to finding expectation value of energy in position eigenstate, first mistake which you make using the formula $\overline E=\langle x|\hat H|x\rangle$ is forgetting to normalize the eigenvector. But position operator has continuous spectrum, which makes all its eigenvectors unnormalizable (i.e. if you try to normalize them, you'll get null vector, which is meaningless as a state). Thus you can't directly find expectation value of energy in position eigenstate.



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