Can anyone give an example of when infinite-dimensional Hilbert spaces are required to describe a physical system? The standard answer to this question is yes, and I'm sure some of you will be quick to point out several clear examples:
Ex. 1: Photon number states {|0⟩,|1⟩,...,|n⟩}
Ex. 2: Harmonic oscillator number states (same as above).
Ex. 3: Continuous-variable basis of a single free particle {|x⟩}∀x∈R
From the infinite number of basis vectors in these examples, it is generally concluded that the dimension of the Hilbert space is also infinite.
However, it is clear that a photon number state such as |ψ⟩=|100⟩ is unphysical (to be clear, this is the Fock number state with n=100, not a tripartite state with one photon in one channel). If you dispute this, I would suggest you try preparing such a state in a single-mode fiber in an optics lab. For this reason, we can apply a (somewhat arbitrary) cutoff value of n and recover a finite-dimensional Hilbert space.
Similarly, the cardinality of the basis set for a free particle is actually N, not R (due to the properties of the function space), and although this set of orthogonal functions is infinite, we can also apply a similar cutoff for any reasonably behaved wavefunction.
Can anyone give an example of a system described by an infinite-dimensional vector space for which such a cutoff cannot be applied?
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