Temporary HW

Problem 1

A researcher in spintronics is investigated two devices in order to generate spin-polarized currents. One of those devices has spins comprising the current described by the density matrix:

${\hat {\rho }}_{1}={\frac {|\uparrow \rangle \langle \uparrow |+|\downarrow \rangle \langle \downarrow |}{2}}$,

while the spins comprising the current in the other device are described by the density matrix

${\hat {\rho }}_{2}=|u\rangle \langle u|$ , where $\ |u\rangle ={\frac {e^{i\alpha }|\uparrow \rangle +e^{i\beta }|\downarrow \rangle }{\sqrt {2}}}$.

Here $|\uparrow \rangle$ and $|\downarrow \rangle$ are the eigenstates of the Pauli spin matrix ${\hat {\sigma }}_{z}$:

${\hat {\sigma }}_{z}|\uparrow \rangle =+1|\uparrow \rangle ,\ {\hat {\sigma }}_{z}|\downarrow \rangle =-1|\downarrow \rangle$.

What is the spin polarization of these two currents? Comment on the physical meaning of the difference between the spin state transported by two currents.

HINT: Compute the x, y, and z components of the spin polarization vector using both of these density matrices following the quantum-mechanical definition of an average value $\langle \sigma _{x,y,z}\rangle =\mathrm {Tr} \,[{\hat {\rho }}{\hat {\sigma }}_{x,y,z}]$.