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
Spin (physics) do so. The study of the behavior of such "spin models" is a thriving area of research in condensed matter physics. For instance, the Ising model describes spins (dipoles) that have only two possible states, up and down, whereas in the Heisenberg model the spin vector is allowed to point in any direction. These models have many interesting properties, which have led to interesting results in the theory of phase transitions. In classical mechanics, the angular momentum of a particle possesses not only a magnitude (how fast the body is rotating), but also a direction (either up or down on