Coherent states for bosons and fermions: A tutorial

Luca Salasnich

R. Shankar

Malte C. Tichy

Progress in the reliable preparation, coherent propagation and efficient detection of many-body states has recently brought collective quantum phenomena of many identical particles into the spotlight. This tutorial introduces the physics of many-boson and many-fermion interference required for the description of current experiments and for the understanding of novel approaches to quantum computing. The field is motivated via the two-particle case, for which the uncorrelated, classical dynamics of distinguishable particles is compared to the quantum behaviour of identical bosons and fermions. Bunching of bosons is opposed to anti-bunching of fermions, while both species constitute equivalent sources of bipartite two-level entanglement. The realms of indistinguishable and distinguishable particles are connected by a monotonic transition, on a scale defined by the coherence length of the interfering particles. As we move to larger systems, any attempt to understand many particles via the two-particle paradigm fails: In contrast to two-particle bunching and anti-bunching, the very same signatures can be exhibited by bosons and fermions, and coherent effects dominate over statistical behaviour. The simulation of many-boson interference, termed Boson-Sampling, entails a qualitatively superior computational complexity when compared to fermions. The hierarchy between bosons and fermions also characterises multipartite entanglement generation, for which bosons again clearly outmatch fermions. Finally, the quantum-to-classical transition between many indistinguishable and many distinguishable particles features non-monotonic structures. While the same physical principles govern small and large systems, the deployment of the intrinsic complexity of collective many-body interference makes more particles behave differently.

Mohammed Daoud A, M. Kibler

We review some basic elements on k-fermions, which are objects interpolating between bosons and fermions. In particular, we define k-fermionic coherent states and study some of their properties. The decomposition of a Q-uon into a boson and a k-fermion leads to a definition of fractional supercoherent states. Such states involve bosonic coherent states and k-fermionic coherent states. We construct an Hamiltonian which generalizes the ordinary (or Z_2-graded) supersymmetric oscillator Hamiltonian. Our Hamiltonian describes a fractional (or Z_k-graded) supersymmetric oscillator for which the fractional supercoherent states are coherent states.

J. DOBACZEWSKl, Jan Dobeš, H. B. Geyer +3 more

Tomáš Tyc, Brett Hamilton, Barry C. Sanders +1 more

Whereas boson coherent states provide an elegant, intuitive and useful representation, we show that the desirable features of boson coherent states do not carry over very well to fermion fields unless one is prepared to use exotic approaches such as Grassmann fields. Specifically, we identify four appealing properties of boson coherent states (eigenstate of annihilation operator, displaced vacuum state, preservation of product states under linear coupling, and factorization of correlators) and show that fermion coherent states, and approximations to fermion coherent states, defined over the complex field, do not behave well for any of these four criteria.