When this quantity is one-half, states can be visualized as either “up” or “down” arrows, which serve as basis vectors for an object whose name was coined by Paul Ehrenfest. For 10 points each:
[10e] Name this quantity, the intrinsic angular momentum carried by a particle.
ANSWER: spin [accept spinor]
[10m] When states of spin-half particles are viewed as spinors, spin operators become 2 by 2 matrices that can be broken into components using this physicist’s three namesake “spin matrices.”
ANSWER: Wolfgang Pauli [or Wolfgang Ernst Pauli]
[10h] For multiple interacting particles, the probability of observing a particular composite state from a given total spin state may be computed using a table of these values, the expansion coefficients for a tensor product of representations into irreducible representations.
ANSWER: Clebsch–Gordan coefficients [prompt on CG coefficients]
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