The Schrödinger equation is be pretty basic stuff but it is pretty cool. This is how it comes from the energy conservation law:
We start out with de Broglie (and the theory of relativity)
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and we know that all particles are also waves, a typical wave equation being
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Just for the fun of it we make the derivative
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and we find out that we can get the momentum through deriving the function. Who would have thought that?
Next we define the momentum operator
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and we assume that for every possible wave function the following is true (this and the definition of the position operator are the axioms of quantum mechanics):
With this knowledge we can look at the energy conservation law of mechanics (T ... kinetic energy, V ... potential energy, E ... total energy)
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The kinetic energy can be rewritten
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We can multiply this equation by Ψ
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Finally we replace the momentum by the momentum operator
3 comments:
Isn't the momentum operator [h/(2πi)](d/dx) = -ihbar(d/dx)
thanks for the correction, I fixed it. I don't know why I moved the 2π from the numerator into the denominator in the third equation.
Schrödinger equation is blogged!
That's pretty cool!
Recently I've made a QM post too:
Are Orbitals Real?!
Would appreciate your opinion on that.
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