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update sign convention of Pauli Y#262

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update sign convention of Pauli Y#262
jrm874 wants to merge 1 commit intoQiskit:mainfrom
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@jrm874 jrm874 commented Oct 24, 2025

This (very minor) PR attempts to fix the discrepancy in the definition of the Pauli Y operator.

The standard definition is Y = [[0, -1j], [1j, 0]].

In the current version, when projecting the Y operator into a subspace spanned by [[False], [True]], one obtains the matrix [[0, 1j], [-1j, 0]] = -Y.

I think that the tests did not cover it because of two reasons:

  1. In the tutorials we test the Heisenberg model, which contains products of Y operators acting on pairs of qubits -> the sign cancels-out.
  2. In the unit tests we only check for the smallest eigenvalue of a single Pauli operator projected into the subspace. This eigenvalue is always -1 regardless of the definition of the sign of Y.

@garrison garrison added the bug Something isn't working label Apr 1, 2026
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