11 Facts About Wave function

Wave function in quantum physics is a mathematical description of the quantum state of an isolated quantum system.

The wave function is a complex-valued probability amplitude, and the probabilities for the possible results of measurements made on the system can be derived from it.

Wave function is a function of the degrees of freedom corresponding to some maximal set of commuting observables.

Since the wave function is complex-valued, only its relative phase and relative magnitude can be measured—its value does not, in isolation, tell anything about the magnitudes or directions of measurable observables; one has to apply quantum operators, whose eigenvalues correspond to sets of possible results of measurements, to the wave function and calculate the statistical distributions for measurable quantities.

In practice, the position-space wave function is used much more often than the momentum-space wave function.

The fact that one wave function describes many particles is what makes quantum entanglement and the EPR paradox possible.

In other words, the wave function is either totally symmetric in the positions of bosons, or totally antisymmetric in the positions of fermions.

Wave function is an element of a function space partly characterized by the following concrete and abstract descriptions.

The Wave function spaces are, due to completeness, very large in a certain sense.

The following constraints on the wave function are sometimes explicitly formulated for the calculations and physical interpretation to make sense:.

Whether the wave function really exists, and what it represents, are major questions in the interpretation of quantum mechanics.