[Physics] Simultaneous eigenstates of Hamiltonian and momentum operator

hamiltonianmomentumquantum mechanicsquantum-tunneling

Given the potential barrier,
\begin{align}
V(x, y) = \left\{ \begin{array}{cc}
V_{0} & \hspace{5mm} \text{if $0 \leq x \leq D$} \\
0 & \hspace{5mm} \text{otherwise}
\end{array} \right.
\end{align}

the Hamiltonian of the system is
$$\hat H = -\frac{\hbar^{2}}{2m}\nabla^{2}+V$$

Hence for $x<0$, the time-independent wavefunction is:
$$\Psi(x) = A\,exp(ikx)+B\, exp(-ikx)$$

This is an eigenvector of $\hat H$ with the first term representing the incident wave while the second term represents the reflected wave.

Now for this region $[\hat H, \hat p]=0$, so they should have common non-degenerate eigenvectors.

But the above wavefunction is not an eigenvector of $\hat p$. What am I thinking wrong here?

Best Answer

In your example the difficulty is that you're taking linear combination of eigenstates of $p$ but with different eigenvalues, so the resulting combination is no longer an eigenstate of $p$, even if the pieces are separately eigenstates.

An alternate example would be the simple case $[\hat H,\hat L^2]=0$ and a hydrogen atom state with $n=2$ so that $\ell=0,1$ can occur. Then $\{\vert n\ell m\rangle\}$ are simultaneous eigenvectors of $\hat H$ and $\hat L^2$ but a combination of these containing different $\ell$s will not be a simultaneous eigenstate of both since different $\ell$ states have different eigenvalues of $\hat L^2$.

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