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Journal of Physics A Mathematical and General

Coherent mixed states and a generalised P representation

R. F. Bishop, Apostol Vourdas

Published Aug 21, 1987• 45 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The pure Glauber (harmonic oscillator) coherent states provide a very useful basis for many purposes. They are complete in the sense that an arbitrary state in the Hilbert space may be expanded in terms of them. Furthermore, the well known P representation provides a diagonal expansion of an arbitrary operator in the Hilbert space in terms of the projection operators onto the coherent states. The authors study the extensions of these results to the analogous mixed states which describe comparable harmonic oscillator systems in thermodynamic equilibrium at non-zero temperatures. Their results are given for the general density operator which describes the mixed squeezed coherent states of the displaced and squeezed harmonic oscillator. They show how these squeezed coherent mixed states similarly provide a very convenient complete description of a Hilbert space. In particular they show how the usual P and Q representations of operators in terms of pure states may be extended to finite temperatures with the corresponding mixed states, and various relations between them are demonstrated. The question of the existence of the generalised P representation for an arbitrary operator is further examined and some pertinent theorems are proven. They also show how their results relate to the Glauber-Lachs formalism in quantum optics for mixtures of coherent and incoherent radiation. Particular attention is focused both on the interplay between the quantum mechanical and thermodynamical uncertainties and on the entropy associated with such mixed states.

DOI
10.1088/0305-4470/20/12/025

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The pure Glauber (harmonic oscillator) coherent states provide a very useful basis for many purposes. They are complete in the sense that an arbitrary state in the Hilbert space may be expanded in terms of them. Furthermore, the well known P representation provides a diagonal expansion of an arbitrary operator in the Hilbert space in terms of the projection operators onto the coherent states. The authors study the extensions of these results to the analogous mixed states which describe comparable harmonic oscillator systems in thermodynamic equilibrium at non-zero temperatures. Their results are given for the general density operator which describes the mixed squeezed coherent states of the displaced and squeezed harmonic oscillator. They show how these squeezed coherent mixed states similarly provide a very convenient complete description of a Hilbert space. In particular they show how the usual P and Q representations of operators in terms of pure states may be extended to finite temperatures with the corresponding mixed states, and various relations between them are demonstrated. The question of the existence of the generalised P representation for an arbitrary operator is further examined and some pertinent theorems are proven. They also show how their results relate to the Glauber-Lachs formalism in quantum optics for mixtures of coherent and incoherent radiation. Particular attention is focused both on the interplay between the quantum mechanical and thermodynamical uncertainties and on the entropy associated with such mixed states.
The thermal coherent states considered previously by the present authors represent an alternative mixed-state generalization of the usual pure-state coherent states. They describe displaced harmonic oscillators in thermodynamic equilibrium with a heat bath at nonzero temperature. We show how they provide a ``random'' (or ``thermal'' or ``noisy'') basis on a quantum-mechanical Hilbert space scrH. Their usefulness rests on the fact that the corresponding statistical density operator provides a probability operator measure on scrH. We thereby show how the thermal coherent states permit a generalization to nonzero temperatures of the well-known P and Q representations of operators in scrH. Particular emphasis here is placed on imbedding the formulation in the Bargmann or holomorphic representation of scrH. We examine the corresponding Bargmann representations of both state vectors and operators, and show how the former relate to the usual position and momentum representations and the latter to the usual P, Q, and W (or Weyl) representations. A particularly important and unexpected result is that the present temperature-dependent generalized P and Q representations are the analytic continuations to negative temperatures of each other. The usual Q and P representations thus represent the limits as the temperature approaches zero along the positive and negative real axes, respectively, of the enlarged generalized Q representation, suitably analytically continued to negative temperatures. We discuss the possible physical applications of the present thermal coherent states to both quantum optics situations involving coherent signals in the presence of thermal noise and to signal and image processing.
Coherent mixed states (or thermal coherent states) associated with the displaced harmonic oscillator at finite temperature, are introduced as a 'random' (or 'thermal' or 'noisy') basis in Hilbert space. A resolution of the identity for these states is proved and used to generalize the usual coherent state formalism for the finite temperature case. The Bargmann representation of an operator is introduced and its relation to the P and Q representations is studied. Generalized P and Q representations for the finite temperature case are also considered and several interesting relations among them are derived.
We introduce coherent mixed states (or thermal coherent states) associated with the displaced harmonic oscillator at nonzero temperature (T ≠ 0), as a "random" (or "thermal" or "noisy") basis in Hilbert space. A resolution of the identity for these states is proven and is used to generalize the usual pure (T = 0) coherent state formalism to the mixed (T ≠ 0) case. This new formalism for thermal coherent states is then further generalized to a broader class of so-called negative-binomial mixed states. It is known that the negative-binomial distribution is itself intimately related to the discrete series of SU(1,1) representations. We consider the pure SU(1,1) coherent states in the two-mode harmonic oscillator space, and show how our negative-binomial mixed states arise from taking the partial trace with respect to one of these two modes. This observation is then used to show how the formalism of thermo-field dynamics may be generalized to a correspondingly much broader negative-binomial-field dynamics, which we expect to have many uses.
The "diagonal" PPP representation of the photon density operator in terms of the coherent states of the radiation field is studied. It is shown that the class of weight functions $P(\ensuremath{\alpha})$ required to represent all density operators by means of the PPP representation is much larger than the class of all probability distributions and that therefore the analogy linking the use of the PPP representation with certain classical stochastic techniques is useful only for a limited class of density operators. The class of density operators for which the PPP representation is appropriate is shown to be limited in the sense that there are density operators that require weight functions so singular as to lie outside the class of all tempered distributions. Conditions on the weight function $P(\ensuremath{\alpha})$ under which the expectation values of the normal ordered operators ${({a}^{\ifmmode\dagger\else\textdagger\fi{}})}^{n}{a}^{m}$ assume a particularly simple integral form are presented. It is shown that if $P(\ensuremath{\alpha})$ is a tempered distribution, then these expectation values are given by a simple limiting process. A limited correspondence with classical optics is suggested by a formula for these expectation values. Conditions that a density operator must satisfy if its weight function is to be non-negative are presented and are shown to exclude all pure states except the coherent states themselves. The problem of representing an arbitrary operator in terms of the coherent states is studied. New measures of the completeness of the coherent states are established.
Abstract In this chapter we discuss statistical mixtures of pure quantum states, resulting in so-called mixed states, and their representation using density operators. The properties of density operators for pure and mixed states are analysed and we examine their time evolution governed by the Liouville-von Neumann equation. As particular examples of interest we consider the density operators for thermal states, focusing on harmonic oscillators and the application of this model to calculate the average photon number for the modes of the electromagnetic field at thermal equilibrium. We then turn to two-level systems, or qubits, which are of particular relevance in quantum information theory and we inspect the geometry of the state space of density operators as a convex subspace of the Hilbert-Schmidt space. Finally, we take a closer look at density operators for bipartite systems which forms the mathematical basis for considering entanglement in later chapters.