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    Angular Momentum and Rotations: Classical Mechanics Homework

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    This document contains John Baez's classical mechanics homework assigned by Scot Childress on February 28, 2008. It addresses four problems regarding angular momentum, rotations, and generating flows from observables. 1) It shows that the exponential of a skew-adjoint operator is orthogonal. 2) It proves that a given function φ is a smooth flow by showing it satisfies the properties of identity at t=0 and additivity. 3) It demonstrates that a given observable F generates the flow from the previous problem using properties of skew-adjoint matrices. 4) It determines the specific flow generated by a second observable F as simultaneous clockwise rotation in the q and p planes.

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    Angular Momentum and Rotations: Classical Mechanics Homework

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    This document contains John Baez's classical mechanics homework assigned by Scot Childress on February 28, 2008. It addresses four problems regarding angular momentum, rotations, and generating flows from observables. 1) It shows that the exponential of a skew-adjoint operator is orthogonal. 2) It proves that a given function φ is a smooth flow by showing it satisfies the properties of identity at t=0 and additivity. 3) It demonstrates that a given observable F generates the flow from the previous problem using properties of skew-adjoint matrices. 4) It determines the specific flow generated by a second observable F as simultaneous clockwise rotation in the q and p planes.

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    This document contains John Baez's classical mechanics homework assigned by Scot Childress on February 28, 2008. It addresses four problems regarding angular momentum, rotations, and generating flows from observables. 1) It shows that the exponential of a skew-adjoint operator is orthogonal. 2) It proves that a given function φ is a smooth flow by showing it satisfies the properties of identity at t=0 and additivity. 3) It demonstrates that a given observable F generates the flow from the previous problem using properties of skew-adjoint matrices. 4) It determines the specific flow generated by a second observable F as simultaneous clockwise rotation in the q and p planes.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    25 views3 pages

    Angular Momentum and Rotations: Classical Mechanics Homework

    Uploaded by

    plfratar
    This document contains John Baez's classical mechanics homework assigned by Scot Childress on February 28, 2008. It addresses four problems regarding angular momentum, rotations, and generating flows from observables. 1) It shows that the exponential of a skew-adjoint operator is orthogonal. 2) It proves that a given function φ is a smooth flow by showing it satisfies the properties of identity at t=0 and additivity. 3) It demonstrates that a given observable F generates the flow from the previous problem using properties of skew-adjoint matrices. 4) It determines the specific flow generated by a second observable F as simultaneous clockwise rotation in the q and p planes.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    of 3

    Classical Mechanics Homework

    February 28, 2008


    John Baez
    homework by Scot Childress

    Angular Momentum and Rotations


    1. Let A be skew-adjoint. Show that etA is orthogonal.

    Lets take a broader view and work in the setting of Hilbert Spaces and bounded linear operators.
    Our first task is to show that the adjoint operator is continuous. To see this, let A be a bounded
    linear operator. Then

    kAxk2 = (Ax, Ax) = (x, A Ax) kA Ak kA kkAk,


    where the second to last inequality follows by Cauchy-Schwartz (x is any unit vector). Then it
    follows (after taking a supremum) that kAk kA k. Reversing the roles of A and A and using the
    fact that (A ) = A gives the reverse inequality. Hence, we see that for any bounded linear operator,
    kAk = kA k. Now let An A be any convergent sequence of operators. We have that

    kAn A k = k(A An ) k = kAn Ak


    and so An A ; the adjoint is therefore a continuous map on the space of bounded linear operators.
    Now, the exponential is defined as a convergent infinite series of operators, so we have by conti-
    nuity:
    
    etA = e(tA) = etA .
    If then A = A we have that
    
    etA etA = etA etA = e0A = I,
    and so, in this case, exponential of A is orthogonal.

    2. Let A so(n) and defined by:

    (t, q, p) = etA q, etA p .


    

    Show that is a flow.

    We begin by showing that 0 is the identity:

    0 (q, p) = e0A q, e0A p = (Iq, Ip) = (q, p).


    

    (The fact that the exponential of the zero operator is the identity follows directly from the power
    series definition of the exponential.) Now we show the additive property of the flow:
     
    t+s (q, p) = e(t+s)A q, e(t+s)A p = etA esA q , etA esA p = t (s (q, p)).
     

    2 2
    Finally, to see that is smooth, we note that the map f : R Rn Rn given by

    f (t, A) = etA .
    is smooth: the components of the matrix etA are simply uniformly convergentbecause the series
    defining the exponential is norm convergentpower series in t and the components of A, and hence

    1
    the individual component functions of f are smooth. Thus f is smooth, and therefore its restriction
    2
    to the smooth submanifold R so(n) of R Rn must be smooth. Whence, , whose two component
    functions are both given by this restriction of f , is smooth as a map

    : R so(n) so(n).
    2
    (The fact that the range is given as so(n), as opposed to Rn , follows from exercise 1.)

    3. For a skew adjoint matrix A, show that the observable


    1X
    F (q, p) = aij (qi pj qj pi )
    2
    generates the flow from the previous exercise.

    First note that from the skew-adjointness of A we have


    X X
    qk F = aki pi = (Ap)k and pk F = aki qi = (Aq)k ,
    i i

    from which it follows that the vector field generated by F is


    X
    {F, } = (Ap)k pk + (Aq)k qk ,
    k

    and so the flow t = ((t), (t)) is determined by the following two systems of ODEs:
     0  0
    (t) = A(t) (t) = A(t)
    and
    (0) = p (0) = q.
    But the solutions to these systems come easily as:

    (t) = etA p and (t) = etA q.


    This yields the desired flow.

    4. Consider the observable

    F (q, p) = q1 p2 q2 p1 .
    Determine the flow.

    In light of the previous exercise, the skew-adjoint matrix associated with this observable is
     
    0 1
    A= .
    1 0
    Whence the flow is given by:

    t (q, p) = etA q, etA p .


    

    Now, notice that

    Ax = ix
    where on the right the vector x is treated as the complex number x1 +ix2 , so that we have (continuing
    to play loose with the identification between R2 and C):

    etA x = eit x = Rt x

    2
    where Rt denotes clockwise rotation through an angle of t radians in R2 . Thus we have that

    t (q, p) = (Rt q, Rt p)
    and the flow is simultaneous clockwise rotation in the q and p planes.

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