Physics Asked on July 24, 2021
Today, in my lecture the following was mentioned:
Given a state $| psi rangle$ in a Hilbert Space $H$, the smallest proposition which is true given this state is given by the projection operator $| psi rangle langle psi |$, which is the smallest projection operator that projects onto the one-dimensional subspace $| psi rangle$.
There are few things I don’t understand here. What is meant by smallest projection operator? Also why is the outer product $| psi rangle langle psi |$ the smallest?
This terminology is not familiar to me, but I can think of only one possibility :
For Hermitian operators, there is a notion of positivity (and therefore an order). In this case we would say that a hermitian projector $P$ is smaller than another $Q$ if : $$forall |varphirangle, langle varphi|P|varphirangleleq langle varphi|Q|varphirangle$$ We see that this is equivalent to the range of $P$ being included in that of $Q$. As any closed subspace containing $|psirangle$ will contain the range of $P$, we see that $P$ is the smallest orthogonal projector with $P|psirangle = |psirangle$.
Answered by SolubleFish on July 24, 2021
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