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Correspondence Principle/Ehrenfest's Theorem

Show that for your wave function

displaymath545

displaymath547

(Background: Note that this shows that your results are consistent with the correspondence principle part of the de Broglie hypothesis, namely that average behavior of the wave packet evolves according to Newton's Laws. The result you find here is a specific case of Ehrenfest's theorem which we will prove in lecture.)

Hint: You should be able to determine ;SPMlt;x;SPMgt; just from the symmetry of tex2html_wrap_inline551 . To determine ;SPMlt;p;SPMgt;, consider carefully the two alternatives of a) using the momentum operator to compute the average and b) using your previous results for the Fourier transforms of Gaussians to get tex2html_wrap_inline555 and then determine the average value of k from where tex2html_wrap_inline555 is centered.



Prof. Tomas Alberto Arias
Thu Mar 20 17:04:34 EST 1997