Quantum Mechanics – Generalization of the Clebsch-Gordan Matrix

angular momentumhilbert-spacequantum mechanicsquantum-spinrepresentation-theory

I am trying to obtain the Clebsch-Gordan matrix that changes from the coupled angular momentum basis to the decoupled basis when coupling several $\frac{1}{2}$ spins.

So far, I have obtained the matrix for three spins by brute force; adding the two first spins and then adding the third one and obtaining their respective Clebsch-Gordan coefficients.

But for more spins doing it by brute force becomes quite tedious since the matrix size grows exponentially. I was wondering if there is a way to generalize the matrix expression for an arbitrary number $n$ of $\frac{1}{2}$ spins and if so, how can it be done.

Thanks in advance

Best Answer

There is no easy way to generalize this. In part this is because the basis states are not unique. In the case of 3 spin-$1/2$ particles, there are two sets of $S=1/2$ states and any linear combination of $\vert 1/2,1/2\rangle_1$ and $\vert 1/2,1/2\rangle_2$ is also a legitimate basis state.

The problem of multiplicities gets worse as you increase the number of spin-1/2 constituents. The number of times the final spin $S$ occurs in an $n$ spin-1/2 system is given in terms of dimensions of Young diagrams with $n$ boxes, and closely tied to the permutation of $n$ objects. This is well understood but constructing states is usually done algorithmically using a computer.

The "more" canonical approach is precisely to use the permutation group. In particular, using (for instance) class operators it's possible to construct different sets, but doing this manually is a serious pain. There's also an approach based on Young projection operators, but it also becomes rapidly impractical to do this "by hand".

You can check out

Tung, Wu-Ki. Group theory in physics. Vol. 1. World Scientific, 1985

or

Ping, J., Wang, F., & Chen, J. Q. (2002). Group representation theory for physicists. World Scientific Publishing Company

or even the venerable

Hamermesh, M. (1989). Group theory and its applications to physical problems for a sense of the techniques based on permutation groups.

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