Description: Define the bra of a
vector used by Dirac notation. Based on definition
of bra in [Prugovecki] p. 186. In
Dirac bra-ket notation,
  is a
complex number equal to the inner product
  . But
physicists like to talk about the individual
components  and  , called bra and ket respectively.
In order for their properties to make sense formally, we define the ket
 as the vector itself, and the bra  as
a
functional from to . We
represent the Dirac notation
  by
 bra     ; see
bravalvalt 9998. The
reversal of the inner product arguments not only makes the bra-ket
behavior consistent with physics literature (see comments under
ax-his3 9100) but is also required in order for the
associative law
kbass2t 10176 to work.
Our definition of bra and the associated outer product df-kb 9908 differs
from, but is equivalent to, a common approach in the literature that
makes use of mappings to a dual space. Our approach eliminates the need
to have a parallel development of this dual space and instead keeps
everything in Hilbert space.
For an extensive discussion about how our notation maps to the
bra-ket
notation in physics textbooks, see
http://us.metamath.org/mpegif/mmnotes.txt,
under the
17-May-2006 entry. |