Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 1800–1803 (1998)Quantum-Mechanical Position Operator in Extended SystemsReceived 15 September 1997; published in the issue dated 2 March 1998 The position operator (defined within the Schrödinger representation in the standard way) becomes meaningless when periodic boundary conditions are adopted for the wave function, as usual in condensed matter physics. I show how to define the position expectation value by means of a simple many-body operator acting on the wave function of the extended system. The relationships of the present findings to the Berry-phase theory of polarization are discussed. © 1998 The American Physical Society URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.80.1800
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevLett.80.1800
PACS:
03.65.Ca, 03.65.Bz, 71.10.-w, 77.84.-s
See AlsoComment: J. Zak, Comment on “Quantum-Mechanical Position Operator in Extended Systems”, Phys. Rev. Lett. 85, 1138 (2000). |
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