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arXiv:1311.1920 · American Journal of Physics

Generalized coherent states

T. G. Philbin

Published Jul 23, 2014• 48 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

In the coherent state of the harmonic oscillator, the probability density is that of the ground state subjected to an oscillation along a classical trajectory. Senitzky and others pointed out that there are states of the harmonic oscillator corresponding to an identical oscillatory displacement of the probability density of any energy eigenstate. These generalizations of the coherent state are rarely discussed, yet they furnish an interesting set of quantum states of light that combine features of number states and coherent states. Here, we give an elementary account of the quantum optics of generalized coherent states.

DOI
10.1119/1.4876963

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In the coherent state of the harmonic oscillator, the probability density is that of the ground state subjected to an oscillation along a classical trajectory. Senitzky and others pointed out that there are states of the harmonic oscillator corresponding to an identical oscillatory displacement of the probability density of any energy eigenstate. These generalizations of the coherent state are rarely discussed, yet they furnish an interesting set of quantum states of light that combine features of number states and coherent states. Here, we give an elementary account of the quantum optics of generalized coherent states.
We first review the properties of the harmonic-oscillator coherent states which can be equivalently defined as (a) a specific subset of the $x\ensuremath{-}p$ minimum-uncertainty states, (b) eigenstates of the annihilation operator, or (c) states created by a certain unitary exponential displacement operator. Then we present a new method for finding coherent states for particles in general potentials. Its basis is the desire to find those states which most nearly follow the classical motion, but it is most nearly a generalization of the minimum-uncertainty method. The properties of these states are discussed in detail. Next we show that the annihilation operator and displacement operator methods, as heretofore defined, cannot be applied to general potentials (whose eigenvalues are not equally spaced). We define a generalization of these methods but show that the states so defined are not, in general, equivalent to the minimum-uncertainty coherent states. We discuss a number of properties of our coherent states and the procedures we have used.
A generalization of the canonical coherent states of a quantum harmonic oscillator has been performed by requiring the conditions of normalizability, continuity in the label, and resolution of the identity operator with a positive weight function. Relying on this approach, in the present scenario, coherent states are generalized over the canonical or finite dimensional Fock space of the harmonic oscillator. A class of generalized coherent states is determined such that the corresponding distributions of the number of excitations depart from the Poisson statistics according to combinations of stretched exponential decays, power laws, and logarithmic forms. The analysis of the Mandel parameter shows that the generalized coherent states exhibit (non-classical) sub-Poissonian or super-Poissonian statistics of the number of excitations, based on the realization of determined constraints. Mittag-Leffler and Wright generalized coherent states are analyzed as particular cases.
Certain superposition (linear combination) of energy eigenfunctions of linear harmonic oscillators are called coherent states because they are of significance in optics for the representation of coherent light waves. A hallmark of coherent states is that the variances (squares of the uncertainties) of x and px are constant in time and further their product becomes the minimum value allowed by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. On the other hand, some linear combinations of harmonic oscillator energy functions give rise to squeezed states . A curious property of squeezed states is that the variances of x and px oscillate in time 180o out of phase with one another with the frequency twice of the oscillator. The wave packet of a coherent state possesses a minimum uncertainty. 〈x〉 and 〈px〉 have the same oscillatory forms as in the classical case. The coherent states have also been called minimum uncertainty coherent states, the Schrödinger coherent states or the Glauber coherent states [1-6]. The squeezed states are sometimes referred to in the literature as two-photon coherent states and generalized coherent states.
In this Chapter we study the Weyl–Heisenberg group in the Schrödinger representation in arbitrary dimension n. One shows that it operates in the Hilbert space of quantum states (and on quantum operators) as a phase-space translation. Then applying it to a Schwartz class state of arbitrary profile we get a set of generalized coherent states. When we apply the Weyl–Heisenberg translation operator to the ground state of the n-dimensional Harmonic Oscillator, one gets the standard coherent states introduced by Schrödinger [233] (Naturwissenshaften 14:664–666, 1926) in the early days of quantum mechanics (1926). Later the coherent states have been extensively studied by Glauber [118, 119] (Phys. Rev. 131:2766–2788, 1963; Phys. Rev. 130:2529–2539, 1963) for the purpose of quantum optics and it seems that their name comes back to this work. The standard coherent states have been generalized by Perelomov [208] (Generalised Coherent States and Their Applications, 1986) to more general Lie groups than the Weyl–Heisenberg group. We also introduce the usual creation and annihilation operators in dimension n which are very convenient for the study of coherent states. We show that coherent states constitute a non-orthogonal over-complete system which yields a resolution of the identity operator in the Hilbert space and which allows a computation of the Hilbert–Schmidt norm and of the trace of respectively Hilbert–Schmidt class and trace-class operators. We study their time-evolution for the quantum Harmonic Oscillator hamiltonian and show that a time evolved coherent state located around phase-space point z is up to a phase a coherent state located around the phase-space point ztz_tzt​, where ztz_tzt​ is the phase-space point of the classical flow governed by the Harmonic Oscillator. This property was described by Schrödinger as the non-spreading of the time evolution of coherent states under the quantum Harmonic Oscillator dynamics. We also show how to go from the Schrödinger to the Fock–Bargmann representation using the standard coherent states.
Following the development of the quantum theory of radiation and with the advent of the laser, the states of the field that most nearly describe a classical electromagnetic field were widely studied. In order to realize such ‘classical’ states, we will consider the field generated by a classical monochromatic current, and find that the quantum state thus generated has many interesting properties and deserves to be called a coherent state . An important consequence of the quantization of the radiation field is the associated uncertainty relation for the conjugate field variables. It therefore appears reasonable to propose that the wave function which corresponds most closely to the classical field must have minimum uncertainty for all times subject to the appropriate simple harmonic potential. In this chapter we show that a displaced simple harmonic oscillator ground state wave function satisfies this property and the wave packet oscillates sinusoidally in the oscillator potential without changing shape as shown in Fig. 2.1. This coherent wave packet always has minimum uncertainty, and resembles the classical field as nearly as quantum mechanics permits. The corresponding state vector is the coherent state |α〉, which is the eigenstate of the positive frequency part of the electric field operator, or, equivalently, the eigenstate of the destruction operator of the field. Classically an electromagnetic field consists of waves with welldefined amplitude and phase. Such is not the case when we treat the field quantum mechanically.