English

The non-self-adjointness of the radial momentum operator in n dimensions

Mathematical Physics 2009-10-31 v2 math.MP

Abstract

The non self-adjointness of the radial momentum operator has been noted before by several authors, but the various proofs are incorrect. We give a rigorous proof that the nn-dimensional radial momentum operator is not self- adjoint and has no self-adjoint extensions. The main idea of the proof is to show that this operator is unitarily equivalent to the momentum operator on L2[(0,),dr]L^{2}[(0,\infty),dr] which is not self-adjoint and has no self-adjoint extensions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.math-ph/0009016,
  title  = {The non-self-adjointness of the radial momentum operator in n dimensions},
  author = {Gil Paz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:math-ph/0009016},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

Some text and a reference added