Heisenberg picture formulation of matrix mechanics in an arbitrary basis, in which the Hamiltonian is not necessarily diagonal. It further serves to define a third, hybrid, picture, the interaction picture. In the Heisenberg picture of quantum mechanics the state vectors, |"ψ("t")"〉, do not change with time, while observables satisfy where is the Hamiltonian and <nowiki>[•,•]</nowiki> denotes the commutator of two operators (in this case and ). Taking expectation values automatically yields the Ehrenfest theorem, featured in the correspondence principle. By the Stone–von Neumann theorem, the Heisenberg picture and the Schrödinger picture are unitarily equivalent, just a basis change in Hilbert space. In
Werner Heisenberg working on nuclear fission and devoted their efforts to more pressing war related work. In September 1942, Heisenberg submitted his first paper of a three-part series on the scattering matrix, or S-matrix, in elementary particle physics. The first two papers were published in 1943 and the third in 1944. The S-matrix described only the states of incident particles in a collision process, the states of those emerging from the collision, and stable bound states; there would be no reference to the intervening states. This was the same precedent as he followed in 1925 in what turned out to be the