cross product
The cross product (or vector product) of two vectors in is a vector http://planetmath.org/node/1285orthogonal to the plane of the two vectors being crossed, whose magnitude is equal to the area of the parallelogram defined by the two vectors. Notice there can be two such vectors. The cross product produces the vector that would be in a right-handed coordinate system with the plane.
We write the cross product of the vectors and as
with and , where is a right-handed orthonormal basis for .
If we regard vectors in as quaternions with real part equal to zero, with , and , then the cross product of two vectors can be obtained by zeroing the real part of the product of the two quaternions. (A similar construction using octonions instead of quaternions gives a βcross productβ in which shares many of the properties of the cross product.)
If we write vectors in the form , then we can express the cross product as
The spectrum of this matrix (and therefore of the map ) is .
Properties of the cross product
In the following, , and will be arbitrary vectors in , and and will be arbitrary real numbers.
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.
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.
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The cross product is a bilinear map. This means that , and that the cross product is distributive over vector addition, that is, and .
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The three properties above mean that the cross product makes into a Lie algebra.
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is orthogonal to both and .
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β’
.
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The length of is the area of the parallelogram spanned by and , so , where is the angle between and . This gives us an expression for the area of a triangle in : if the vertices are at , and , then the area is , which can be written more symmetrically as .
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β’
From the above, you can see that the cross product of any vector with is . More generally, the cross product of two parallel vectors is , since .
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One can also see that .
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. This is the vector triple product.
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The cross product is rotationally invariant (http://planetmath.org/RotationalInvarianceOfCrossProduct). That is, for any rotation matrix we have .
Title | cross product |
Canonical name | CrossProduct |
Date of creation | 2013-03-22 11:58:52 |
Last modified on | 2013-03-22 11:58:52 |
Owner | yark (2760) |
Last modified by | yark (2760) |
Numerical id | 46 |
Author | yark (2760) |
Entry type | Definition |
Classification | msc 15A90 |
Classification | msc 15A72 |
Synonym | vector product |
Synonym | outer product |
Related topic | Vector |
Related topic | DotProduct |
Related topic | TripleScalarProduct |
Related topic | ExteriorAlgebra |
Related topic | DyadProduct |