Paper 1, Section II, B
A isotropic harmonic oscillator of mass and frequency has lowering operators
where and are the position and momentum operators. Assuming the standard commutation relations for and , evaluate the commutators and , for , among the components of the raising and lowering operators.
How is the ground state of the oscillator defined? How are normalised higher excited states obtained from ? [You should determine the appropriate normalisation constant for each energy eigenstate.]
By expressing the orbital angular momentum operator in terms of the raising and lowering operators, show that each first excited state of the isotropic oscillator has total orbital angular momentum quantum number , and find a linear combination of these first excited states obeying and .