THE GEOMETRY OF LINEAR ALGEBRA

Corinne A. Manogue, Tevian Dray

6.4 Representations of the Dirac Delta

🔗
Function
¶
🔗 Some other useful representations of the delta function are:
∞
1
ixt
δ(x) = ∫ e dt
2π −∞

1
δ(x) = lim [Θ(x + ϵ) − Θ(x − ϵ)]
ϵ→0 2ϵ
2
1 x
δ(x) = lim exp(− )
2
ϵ→0
√2πϵ 2ϵ

1 ϵ
δ(x) = lim
2 2
π ϵ→0 x + ϵ

sin N x
δ(x) = lim
N →∞ πx
2
1 d
δ(x) = |x|
2 dx2
∞
1 dt
δ(x) = ∫
2
π −∞
t(t − x)

🔗 where Cauchy-Principal Value integration is implied in the last integral. (You can
find more limit representations of the delta function at the
[[http://functions.wolfram.com/GeneralizedFunctions/DiracDelta/09/|Wolfram
Research site]].)

🔗 In quantum mechanics, we sometimes use the closure relation given by:

∞

′ ′
δ(x − x ) = ∑ ϕn (x) ϕn (x )

n=0

🔗 where the ϕ are a complete set of real orthonormal eigenfunctions for a

n

hermitian differential operator.