For the fundamental alone, the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem places the limiting sampling rate at twice that frequency:
Use a rate strictly above this boundary for a sinusoid of unknown phase: exactly two samples per cycle can, for a particular phase, all fall at zero. If higher Fourier harmonics are retained, the sampling rate must instead exceed twice the highest retained frequency, or those components must be removed to prevent aliasing.
For a straightforward discrete Fourier transform estimate, Fourier frequency resolution obeys . Resolving therefore suggests
At the limiting sampling rate this is about samples. These are the usual sampling and spectral-resolution estimates. The value is not a universal lower bound on single-tone frequency estimation: fitting a sinusoidal model with sufficiently low noise can estimate its frequency more precisely than the spacing of discrete Fourier transform bins. The question gives no noise level or estimator, so a sharper universal minimum time cannot be deduced.
Let denote an incident muon and a detector signal. The selected sample is conditioned on . The law of total probability gives
By Bayes' theorem, the contamination, namely the conditional probability that a selected particle is not a muon, is
For example, per incident particles the expected selected counts are true muons and other particles. The denominator is the selected particles; the rejected muons are outside this sample.
The Born rule uses the squared modulus of the wavefunction, not its real part. Write . Then
Wavefunction normalization requires
Integrating the probability density over the required interval gives the dimensionless probability
Thus approximately of position measurements fall in this interval.
The protons at the Large Hadron Collider are ultrarelativistic: their energy is much greater than their rest energy, about . The relativistic energy-momentum relation therefore gives . Using the de Broglie wavelength,
Thus the conventional de Broglie wavelength estimate is a distance of order .
There is a conventional factor of in interpreting this estimate. Spatial resolution from momentum transfer is often expressed as , where is the transferred momentum multiplied by the speed of light. Taking of order the beam energy gives
Both conventions describe the same characteristic scale up to . The beam energy alone does not give an exact experimental spatial resolution: a particular collision probes a scale set by its actual momentum transfer.
Let the infinite outer walls be at , the finite steps at , and the three potential energy values be . The original drawing specifies the ordering
The energy eigenstates can be chosen real. The Dirichlet boundary conditions are ; wavefunction matching at a finite potential step requires both and to be continuous at . In particular, neither finite step acts as an additional hard wall.
The time-independent Schrödinger equation gives
Thus a wavefunction is sinusoidal in a classically allowed region, with wavenumber , and a linear combination of exponential functions in a classically forbidden region, with inverse decay length . Its curvature changes sign relative to at a step crossing ; its slope does not jump.
By the Sturm oscillation theorem, the three energy eigenstates have exactly zero, one, and two interior nodes, respectively. Choose their global phases so that their slopes at the left wall are positive:
  • : a positive lobe in the left-hand potential well, followed by a nonoscillatory tail through the barrier and right-hand region. The tail reaches zero at the right wall. There are no interior nodes.
  • : two lobes of opposite sign in the left-hand potential well, with one interior node, followed by a nonoscillatory tail of the sign of the second lobe. Both the middle and right regions are classically forbidden regions.
  • : sinusoidal behavior in both outer regions, joined through the nonoscillatory barrier. There are two interior nodes in total. The right-hand wavelength is longer than the left-hand wavelength, because .
For , the right-hand piece is proportional to , rather than a pure decaying exponential: this enforces the finite-distance hard wall exactly. The barrier pieces likewise contain both exponential solutions. Their small tails are an instance of quantum tunnelling.
Figure 1.
Illustrative lowest three wavefunctions for the potential ordering in A1
. Details.
This is an original illustrative calculation, with vertical lines marking only the region boundaries. It uses , , , , , , and in arbitrary energy units. Its lowest energy eigenvalues are approximately , so it has exactly the required ordering. Here both nodes of the third wavefunction happen to lie towards the left; its dominant lobe is on the right. These precise positions and relative amplitudes are illustrative: the original drawing supplies no numerical lengths, barrier heights, or mass, so it does not determine a unique quantitative wavefunction. The required sketch features are the matching, curvature, hard-wall zeros, and ordered node counts.

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 5. . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact