Up to now we have limited ourselves to states of a single particle. In the present chapter we shall introduce the description of two-particle states. Once this case is understood, it will be easy to generalize to any number of particles. States of two (or more) particles lead to very rich configurations called entangled states. A remarkable feature is that two entangled quantum particles, even at arbitrarily large spatial separations, continue to form a single entity and no classical probabilistic model is able to reproduce the correlation between particles. In the first section we shall present the essential mathematical formalism, that of the tensor product. This will permit us in Section 6.2 to describe quantum mixtures using the state operator formalism. Section 6.3 is devoted to the study of important physical consequences like the Bell inequalities and interference experiments involving entangled states, which will lead us to a deeper understanding of quantum physics. Finally, in the last section we shall briefly review applications to measurement theory and quantum information theory. The latter is undergoing rapid development at present and has applications to quantum computing, cryptography, and teleportation.

The tensor product of two vector spaces

Definition and properties of the tensor product

We wish to construct the space of states of two physical systems which we assume initially to be completely independent. Let ℌN1 and ℌM2 be the spaces of states of the two systems, of dimension N and M, respectively.