Heisenberg picture Heisenberg picture In physics, the Heisenberg picture (also called the Heisenberg representation) is a formulation (largely due to Werner Heisenberg in 1925) of quantum mechanics in which the operators (observables and others) incorporate a dependency on time, but the state vectors are time-independent, an arbitrary fixed basis rigidly underlying the theory. It stands in contrast to the Schrödinger picture in which the operators are constant, instead, and the states evolve in time. The two pictures only differ by a basis change with respect to time-dependency, which corresponds to the difference between active and passive transformations. The Heisenberg picture is the
Heisenberg group real Lie group of dimension 3. In addition to the representation as real 3x3 matrices, the continuous Heisenberg group also has several different representations in terms of function spaces. By Stone–von Neumann theorem, there is, up to isomorphism, a unique irreducible unitary representation of H in which its centre acts by a given nontrivial character. This representation has several important realizations, or models. In the "Schrödinger model", the Heisenberg group acts on the space of square integrable functions. In the theta representation, it acts on the space of holomorphic functions on the upper half-plane; it is so named for its