Jacobi triple product
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In mathematics, the Jacobi triple product is the simple and beautiful mathematical identity:
for complex numbers x and y, with |x| < 1 and y ≠ 0.
It is attributed to Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi, who proved it in 1929 in his work Fundamenta Nova Theoriae Functionum Ellipticarum. [1]
The basis of Jacobi's proof relies on Euler's pentagonal number theorem, which is itself a specific case of the Jacobi Triple Product Identity.
Let x = q3 / 2 and
. Then we have
The Jacobi Triple Product also allows the Jacobi theta function to be written as an infinite product as follows:
Let x = eiπτ and
.
Then the Jacobi theta function
can be written in the form
Using the Jacobi Triple Product Identity we can then write the theta function as the product
There are many different notations used to express the Jacobi triple product. It takes on a concise form when expressed in terms of q-Pochhammer symbols:
Where
is the infinite q-Pochhammer symbol.
It enjoys a particularly elegant form when expressed in terms of the Ramanujan theta function. For | ab | < 1. it can be written as
[edit] Proof
This proof uses a simplified model of the Dirac sea and follows the proof in Cameron (13.3) which is attributed to Richard Borcherds. It treats the case where the power series are formal. For the analytic case, see Apostol. The Jacobi triple product identity can be expressed as
A level is a half-integer. The vacuum state is the set of all negative levels. A state is a set of levels whose symmetric difference with the vacuum state is finite. The energy of the state S is
and the particle number of S is
An unordered choice of the presence of finitely many positive levels and the absence of finitely many negative levels (relative to the vacuum) corresponds to a state, so the generating function
for the number of states of energy m with l particles can be expressed as
On the other hand, any state with l particles can be obtained from the lowest energy l − particle state, {v:v < l}, by rearranging particles: take a partition
of m' and move the top particle up by λ1 levels, the next highest particle up by λ2 levels, etc.... The resulting state has energy
, so the generating function can also be written as
where p(n) is the partition function. The uses of random partitions by Andrei Okounkov contains a picture of a partition exciting the vacuum.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Remmert, R. (1998). Classical Topics in Complex Function Theory (pp. 28-30). New York: Springer.
[edit] References
- See chapter 14, theorem 14.6 of Apostol, Tom M. (1976), Introduction to analytic number theory, Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics, New York-Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, MR0434929, ISBN 978-0-387-90163-3
- Peter J. Cameron, Combinatorics: Topics, Techniques, Algorithms, (1994) Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-45761-0













