Wigner's friend and continuous time evolution of the state of a closed system and the probabilistic, discontinuous collapse of the state of a system upon measurement. Wigner's friend is therefore directly linked to the measurement problem in quantum mechanics with its famous Schrödinger's cat paradox. The thought experiment posits a friend of Wigner in a laboratory and lets him perform a quantum measurement on a physical system (this could be a spin system or also Schrödinger's cat). This system is assumed to be in a superposition of two distinct states, say, state 0 and state 1 (or "dead" and "alive", in the
Sum rule in quantum mechanics to construct operator equalities, which are then applied to the particles or energy levels of a system. Assume that the Hamiltonian formula_1 has a complete set of eigenfunctions formula_2 with eigenvalues formula_3: For the Hermitian operator formula_5 we define the repeated commutator formula_6 iteratively by: The operator formula_8 is Hermitian since formula_5 is defined to be Hermitian. The operator formula_10 is anti-Hermitian: By induction one finds: and also For a Hermitian operator we have Using this relation we derive: The result can be written as For formula_17 this gives: See oscillator strength. Sum rule in quantum mechanics In quantum mechanics,