Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2007 iii Paper 10 3 b Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Let be the given regular irreducible family. Write and . Define the strongly integrated operatorThe Gaussian is integrable and the operators are unitary, so the integral defines a bounded operator on each vector. The Weyl relation and give . For its square, the coefficient at isby the two-dimensional Gaussian integral. Thus . The same Gaussian integration, with an inserted Weyl operator, givesThis is the Gaussian projection in a Weyl representation.
It is nonzero. Otherwise all its conjugates would vanish; the Weyl relation makes their matrix coefficients the Fourier transforms of , with the dual variable . Uniqueness of the Fourier transform of an integrable function would make each such function zero. Strong continuity then makes its value at zero vanish, contradicting for a nonzero vector.
Choose a unit vector . Irreducibility makes the span of dense. If is perpendicular to , the boxed identity makes it perpendicular to this entire span, so . Hence has rank one, and its identity gives .
In the concrete representation of part (a), the Gaussian has precisely this expectation. With the linear-in-first inner-product convention, both orbit families have Gram matrixTherefore the map is well-defined and isometric. Its source and target spans are dense, so it extends to a unitary operator intertwiner. This proves the unitary equivalence, the Stone-von Neumann theorem in the normalization of this question, rather than invoking that theorem as the proof.
Stone-von Neumann theorem 2026-10-14
Every irreducible strongly continuous representation of the Weyl relations with fixed nonzero central character is unitarily equivalent to the translation-modulation representation on . The Gaussian projection in a Weyl representation supplies a cyclic vector whose Weyl-orbit inner products agree with those of a Gaussian in the standard representation. Matching those orbit vectors gives the unitary intertwiner, with no appeal to a classification assertion in place of the proof.