Is there any physical significance of operator norm/spectral norm of a hermitian operator?
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Well, the operator norm of any normal - and therefore Hermitian - operator is equal to the spectral radius. Thus it gives the least upper bound on the magnitude of the largest eigenvalue - colloquially, the size of the largest observable quantity. Of course, many important operators on various Hilbert spaces in QM are not bounded, so there is not terribly much physical insight from this reasoning to be gained in those cases. |
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