Inside the infinite square well, the orbital and spin operators act on different factors of the tensor product. Write . The identity
shows that the exchange interaction commutes with and . The sum of the one-particle kinetic energies also commutes with them and with particle exchange. Thus one may use orbital quantum numbers together with the total-spin sector and projection , with physical .
For identical spin one-half particles the Pauli exclusion principle further restricts the states. The spin-one-half singlet state is antisymmetric in spin and must multiply a symmetric spatial wavefunction; a spin-one-half triplet state must multiply an antisymmetric spatial wavefunction. Thus label unordered orbital occupations in symmetry-adapted states, not arbitrary ordered product states. This gives the labels , with the paper's last label expressed in units of .
By addition of angular momentum, combining the first two spin one-half particles gives . Adding the third gives the three spin-one-half angular-momentum decomposition
Thus there is one total-spin sector and two independent sectors. Since the particles are distinguishable, no fermionic exchange symmetry restriction removes either copy. In a simultaneous angular momentum eigenstate, and have eigenvalues and , so
The energy levels and their generic multiplicities are
The count agrees with the dimension of the three-particle tensor product. These multiplicities must be added whenever numerical energy eigenvalues coincide. In particular, for and , there are two fourfold degenerate energy levels, and . For and , the multiplicities at are . If both coefficients vanish, the single energy level has multiplicity eight. Other coincidences between the two total-spin sectors occur when , with from the quartet and from a doublet.
Write the trap angular frequency as and the single-particle oscillator length as . The center of mass coordinate and relative coordinate give independent quantum harmonic oscillators, both of frequency , with masses and reduced mass . Label their excitation numbers by and . The unperturbed energy eigenvalue is .
Particle exchange leaves unchanged and sends to . The exchange symmetry of two identical spin-one-half fermions therefore requires even to accompany the spin-one-half singlet state, and odd to accompany a spin-one-half triplet state. For the contact shifts of two spin-one-half fermions in a harmonic trap, the delta potential depends only on . For odd , the relative wavefunction vanishes at , so its contact shift is zero. Within the first-excited manifold, both perturbations are diagonal in the labels : this is a perturbation diagonal within a degenerate eigenspace. For , the relative oscillator length is , giving the first-order nondegenerate perturbation theory shift
The Zeeman splitting is for total spin projection . Thus the five lowest states, counted with multiplicity, have
under the assumed conditions . The three triplet states have slopes , while both singlet states are field independent at this order. The three triplet state branches coincide at zero magnetic field. Their crossing with the excited singlet state is allowed because the total-spin sectors do not mix. The odd relative wavefunctions are in fact unaffected by this delta potential at any coupling; the displayed singlet state shifts retain only first order.
Figure 1.
Five lowest two-fermion states in a weakly interacting harmonic trap
. Original plot for repulsive contact shift , with . The two horizontal singlet state branches and three triplet state branches count five states; coincident energies count as fewer distinct energy levels. An attractive coupling reverses the sign of and moves both singlet state branches downward. Details.
Put and . The total-spin sector with spin zero consists of the spin singlet state , not the whole subspace with zero component. These must be distinguished: the Bell state has zero component but total spin one.
There are two meanings of verification to separate here. A one-pair entanglement-assisted statistical singlet verification is possible: choose a shared random axis from , measure that axis's two-spin parity by the meter circuit below, and accept anticorrelation. An or test uses local basis changes before and after the computational-axis circuit. The singlet always passes and is unchanged. Averaging the three acceptance projectors gives
Every triplet state passes with probability , so a failure excludes the singlet, while repeated tests on independently prepared copies can give statistical confidence. A single pass does not certify the singlet with certainty.
Exact single-shot verification cannot be implemented with just one shared Bell pair. Here exact verification means a yes outcome with probability one on the spin singlet state, zero on its orthogonal complement, and preservation of the singlet on yes. If that stronger meaning is intended, the question needs an extra resource. The Bell-pair cost of exact nondemolition singlet verification gives a short proof. For a fully resolved tuple of local measurement records, contraction of the shared gives a system Kraus operator
Local ancillas and locally adaptive operations are included in these operators. Refining any unobserved local environment gives the same form, so the operator Schmidt rank is at most two. On each nonzero yes branch, zero false positives forces to vanish on the entire triplet subspace, and singlet preservation forces
The four Pauli matrices, including the identity, are an orthogonal operator basis. Thus has operator Schmidt rank four, contradicting the rank-two bound. At least one yes branch is nonzero because the singlet must pass with certainty. Shared classical randomness cannot evade this branchwise argument.
With two shared Bell pairs, an explicit corrected protocol is available. On the first meter pair, apply local system-to-meter CNOT gates and measure both meters in the computational basis. If their records are , the Kraus operator is , where and . On the second pair, measure by the same circuit conjugated with local Hadamard gates on the system. The two parities commute, and their joint projectors are the four Bell-state nondemolition measurement projectors. The singlet is exactly the outcome and remains unchanged. Local interactions and readouts fit within the stated interval; the combined verdict becomes available only after the records are compared by classical communication.
This corrected exact protocol resolves the triplet into three Bell states. It preserves the singlet and every Bell state, but generally destroys triplet superpositions. A binary Lüders rule measurement preserving all triplet coherence is a different operation: it violates the singlet-triplet measurement causality obstruction. The one-pair protocol used below measures a single parity and supplies the statistical test above; it does not give exact single-shot singlet verification.
The spin raising operator and spin lowering operator are
The angular momentum commutation relations imply
so is proportional to . Since
its squared norm is
Choosing the conventional positive phase gives
Using the spin ladder operators,
and therefore
In the ordered product basis of the tensor product of quantum systems
the matrix representation is
The two parallel-spin states are already eigenvectors. Diagonalizing the central block gives the four energy eigenvalues
This is the spectrum of the Two-spin Heisenberg Hamiltonian in an opposing longitudinal field.
The asserted ground-state ordering requires the antiferromagnetic case . As ,
The corresponding state at is the unique spin-one-half singlet state
whereas the three states at the first excited energy form the spin-one-half triplet state.
Indeed, for the total angular momentum operator
one has at
The Hamiltonian then has rotational symmetry, so energy depends only on the total-spin sector. The singlet has total spin and multiplicity one; the triplet has and multiplicity . This rotational symmetry explains why the triplet energy eigenspace has dimension three.
A boson is an identical particle whose total multiparticle quantum state is symmetric under exchange of any two particles, whereas a fermion has a total state that is antisymmetric under every exchange. The Spin-statistics theorem associates integer spin with bosons and half-integer spin with fermions.
For three distinguishable spin-one particles, the spin Hilbert space has dimension
Let
be the total angular momentum operator. Since each particle has
we have
The Hamiltonian operator is consequently
On the total-spin sector with quantum number , its energy eigenvalue is
The Clebsch-Gordan decomposition may be performed by first coupling particles and . Their intermediate spin is , and coupling the third spin gives
Thus the three spin-one angular-momentum decomposition contains total spin with multiplicities . Multiplying each multiplicity by the multiplet dimension gives
The degeneracies sum to , as required.
When the particles are indistinguishable, their integer spin makes them bosons. Their common spatial wavefunction is symmetric, so their spin wavefunction must also lie in the symmetric three-spin-one subspace. Its decomposition is
Hence only the and levels remain, now with one copy of each multiplet:
Normalize the stated Pauli matrices as
The factor changes only the overall normalization at fixed . In the spin-one Cartesian basis, the associated periodic uniform matrix product state is
This is the Pauli-matrix representation of the Affleck--Kennedy--Lieb--Tasaki state.
The Pauli matrix multiplication law
shows that products on two neighboring sites span all of , so the tensor is an injective matrix product state after blocking two sites. More geometrically, its two-site image is the scalar plus antisymmetric subspace of , namely the total-spin and sectors. By the Two-site support of the Pauli-matrix Affleck--Kennedy--Lieb--Tasaki tensor, the missing subspace is the five-dimensional symmetric traceless sector.
Let be the orthogonal projection onto that sector. The parent Hamiltonian of a matrix product state is
Each term annihilates , so this is a frustration-free quantum Hamiltonian and the MPS is a ground state. Writing and using the eigenvalues in the three total-spin sectors gives the explicit projector
This is the Affleck--Kennedy--Lieb--Tasaki parent Hamiltonian. Injectivity implies that its periodic ground state is unique for every sufficiently long chain.
Total angular momentum operator Created 2026-09-29 Updated 2026-10-18
For a composite quantum system, the total angular momentum operator is the sum of the constituent angular momenta, with each summand acting on its own tensor factor. Its simultaneous eigenstates with organize the state space into total-spin sectors.