Definition and formulas for harmonic oscillator coherent states and spin coherent states are reviewed in detail. The path integral formalism and its relation with the partition function of a system are also reviewed. The harmonic oscillator coherent state path integral is evaluated exactly at the discrete level and then used to find its continuum limit using various regularizations. The computation of the path integral for a particle of spin s put in a constant magnetic field is carried out using harmonic oscillator coherent states and spin coherent states, with a careful analysis of infinitesimal terms (in 1/N where N is the number of time slices) appearing in the Lagrangian. A mapping of the spin system into a CP1 model is shown explicitly. The theory of a spinless particle in the field of a magnetic monopole and its relation with the spin system are explained. The equivalence of these two models is established up to infinitesimal order by the introduction of an external field correction. This gives a new representation of a coherent state path integral in terms of a more familiar Feynman path integral.
A method for calculating the spin of the ground quantum state of nonrelativistic electrons and distance between energy levels of quantum states differing in the spin magnitude from first principles is proposed. The approach developed is free from the one-electron approximation and applicable in multielectron systems with allowance for all spatial correlations. The possibilities of the method are demonstrated by the example of calculating the energy gap between spin states in model ellipsoidal quantum dots with a harmonic confining field. The results of computations by the Monte Carlo method point to high sensitivity of the energy gap to the break of spherical symmetry of the quantum dot. For three electrons, the phenomenon of inversion has been revealed for levels corresponding to high and low values of the spin. The calculations demonstrate the practical possibility to obtain spin states with arbitrarily close energies by varying the shape of the quantum dot, which is a key condition for development prospects in technologies of storage systems based on spin qubits.