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 a group, as is shown by the multiplication: and The Heisenberg group is a simply-connected Lie group whose Lie algebra consists of matrices where By letting e, ..., e be the canonical basis of R, and setting the associated Lie algebra can be characterized by the canonical commutation relations, where "p", ..., "p", "q", ..., "q", "z" are the algebra generators. In particular, "z" is a "central" element of the Heisenberg Lie algebra. Note that the Lie algebra of the Heisenberg group is nilpotent. The exponential map is given by the following expression The exponential map of a nilpotent Lie