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 the special property that the exponential map is a one-to-one and onto map from the Lie algebra formula_16 to the group formula_1. More general Heisenberg groups formula_31 may be defined for higher dimensions in Euclidean space, and more generally on symplectic vector spaces. The simplest general case is the real Heisenberg group of dimension formula_32, for any integer formula_33. As a group of matrices, formula_31 (or formula_35 to indicate this is the Heisenberg group over the field formula_36 of real numbers) is defined as the group formula_37 matrices with entries in formula_36 and having the form: where This is indeed