Spin (physics) - Mathematical Formulation of Spin - Spin and Rotations

Spin and Rotations

As described above, quantum mechanics states that component of angular momentum measured along any direction can only take a number of discrete values. The most convenient quantum mechanical description of particle's spin is therefore with a set of complex numbers corresponding to amplitudes of finding a given value of projection of its intrinsic angular momentum on a given axis. For instance, for a spin 1/2 particle, we would need two numbers a_±1/2, giving amplitudes of finding it with projection of angular momentum equal to ħ/2 and −ħ/2, satisfying the requirement

For a generic particle with spin s, we would need 2s+1 such parameters. Since these numbers depend on the choice of the axis, they transform into each other non-trivially when this axis is rotated. It's clear that the transformation law must be linear, so we can represent it by associating a matrix with each rotation, and the product of two transformation matrices corresponding to rotations A and B must be equal (up to phase) to the matrix representing rotation AB. Further, rotations preserve the quantum mechanical inner product, and so should our transformation matrices:

Mathematically speaking, these matrices furnish a unitary projective representation of the rotation group SO(3). Each such representation corresponds to a representation of the covering group of SO(3), which is SU(2). There is one n-dimensional irreducible representation of SU(2) for each dimension, though this representation is n-dimensional real for odd n and n-dimensional complex for even n (hence of real dimension 2n). For a rotation by angle θ in the plane with normal vector, U can be written

where and is the vector of spin operators.