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martinbn
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vanhees71 said:Before you usually have a thermal state of a beam of silver atoms coming from an oven with a little opening, which is well approximated by a Gaussian wave packet with a momentum spread given by the thermal width. After the Stern-Gerlach apparatus you have a superposition of two wave packets (for spin 1/2), where the spin component in direction of the magnetic field is entangled with position, i.e., the spin-up and spin-down are spatially separated. This can be treated (semi-)analytically, see e.g.,
G. Potel, F. Barranco, S. Cruz-Barrios, and J. Gómez-Camacho. Quantum mechanical description of Stern-Gerlach experiments. Phys. Rev. A, 71, 2005.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.71.052106
Are you talking about the whole ensemble? I was asking about the state of an individual atom before and after it passes through the Stern-Gerlach.