Wave function
Physical significance of relative phase

While the relative phase has observable effects in experiments, the global phase of the system is experimentally indistinguishable. For example in a particle in superposition of two states, the global phase of the particle cannot be distinguished by finding expectation value of observable or probabilities of observing different states but relative phases can affect the expectation values of observables.

While the overall phase of the system is considered to be arbitrary, the relative phase for each state | ϕ i ⟩ {\textstyle |\phi _{i}\rangle } of a prepared state in superposition can be determined based on physical meaning of the prepared state and its symmetry. For example, the construction of spin states along x direction as a superposition of spin states along z direction, can done by applying appropriate rotation transformation on the spin along z states which provides appropriate phase of the states relative to each other.
detectable_format:constrained_response