19/9/2017 Exponentials of operators Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff formula | Physics pages

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Exponentials of operators Baker-Campbell-

Hausdor formula
References: Shankar, R. (1994), Principles of Quantum Mechanics, Plenum Press. Section
1.9.

Although the result in this post isnt covered in Shankars book, its a result that is frequently
used in quantum theory, so its worth including at this point.

Weve seen how to define a function of an operator if that function can be expanded in a
power series. A common operator function is the exponential:

If is hermitian, the exponential is unitary. If we try to calculate the exponential of two

operators such as , the result isnt as simple as we might hope if and dont commute.
To see the problem, we can write this out as a power series

The problem appears first in the fourth term in the series, since we cant condense the
sum into if . In fact, the expansion of can be written entirely in
terms of the commutators of and with each other, nested to increasingly higher levels.

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19/9/2017 Exponentials of operators Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff formula | Physics pages

This formula is known as the Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff formula. Up to the fourth order

commutator, the BCH formula gives

There is no known closed form expression for this result. However, an important special case
that occurs frequently in quantum theory is the case where , where is a complex
scalar and is the usual identity matrix. Since commutes with all operators, all terms from
the third order upwards are zero, and we have

We can prove this result as follows. Start with the operator function

where is a scalar parameter (not necessarily time!).

From its definition,

The inverse is

and the derivative is

Note that we have to keep the factor to the left of the factor because .
Now we multiply:

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19/9/2017 Exponentials of operators Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff formula | Physics pages

We used Hadamards lemma in the penultimate line, which in this case reduces to

because so all higher order commutators are zero.

We end up with an expression in which has disappeared. This gives the differential
equation for :

We try a solution of the form (this apparently appears from divine inspiration):

From which we get

Comparing this to 18, we have

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19/9/2017 Exponentials of operators Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff formula | Physics pages

Setting this equal to the original definition of in 7 and then taking we have

If we swap with and use the fact that , and also , we have

This is the restricted form of the BCH formula for the case where is a scalar.

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This entry was posted in Uncategorised and tagged Baker-Campbell-Hausdor , Hadamard's lemma on Thu, 17
November 2016 [http://www.physicspages.com/2016/11/17/exponentials-of-operators-baker-campbell-
hausdor -formula/] .

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