There exist several well–known characterizations of Poisson and mixed Poisson point processes (Cox processes) by thinning and splitting procedures. So a point process is necessarily a Cox process if for arbitrary small thinning parameter it can be obtained by a thinning of some other point process [30]. Poisson processes are characterized by the independence of the two random subconfigurations obtained by an independent splitting of the configuration into two parts [11]. For quantum mechanical particle systems beam splittings which are well–known in quantum optics provide analogous procedures. It is shown that coherent states respectively mixtures of them can be characterized in the same way as Poisson processes and Cox processes. Moreover, for the position distributions of these states which are “classical” point processes just the above mentioned characterizations are obtained. As example of mixed coherent states we consider Gaussian states which arise as equilibrium states of ideal Bose gases.
Following the work of P. Bona [J. Math. Phys. 29, 2223 (1988)], a class of infinite mean-field quantum lattice systems is considered within the framework of algebraic quantum mechanics, and the following question is discussed: Which are the possible dynamical descriptions of the system, i.e., in which representations π of the system’s quasilocal C*-algebra 𝒜 do the local time evolutions converge in the thermodynamic limit to an automorphism group of a certain enlarged C*-algebra 𝒞π containing π(𝒜) and (some of) the classical observables of the system in π. To this end we associate a ‘‘classical state space’’ Eπ to any representation π (which is a subset of the phase-space E⊇RL defined by Bona for the largest possible representation), and show how it is characterized by the π-normal states, thereby obtaining a way to determine Eπ explicitly in many cases. The answer to the question posed then reads: The limiting (Heisenberg) dynamics exists in π on 𝒞π if and only if the set Eπ is invariant under the flow φQt on E which describes the time evolution of classical observables. Conversely, to any invariant, closed subset B of E, there exists a dynamical description of the quantum system with classical state space B.
Recently, Markham and Vedral [Phys. Rev. A 67, 042113 (2003)] investigated the effect of beam splitting on the spin, or SU(2), coherent states for a single mode field. The spin coherent state is a binomial coherent state related to the Holstein-Primakoff realization of the su(2) Lie algebra given in terms of a set of single mode bose annihilation and creation operators. Upon beam splitting, the ordinary (or Glauber) coherent states merely split into products of ordinary coherent states with reduced amplitudes without becoming entangled, as one would expect for a classical-like field. The above authors expected the spin coherent states to go over to the ordinary coherent states in the limit of high spin, $j\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{\infty}$, and thus to become product states after beam splitting. But this expectation was not confirmed through numerical calculation of the entropy which, instead of going to zero, leveled off with increasing spin. In this paper we find similar behavior for SU(1,1) coherent states of the Perelomov type for large Bargman index
k, but also find that the Barut-Girardello SU(1,1) coherent states appear to rapidly become product states after beam splitting for increasing
k. We explain these results by showing that, in reality, neither the spin coherent states nor the Perelomov SU(1,1) coherent states go over to ordinary coherent states in the limits of large
j or
k, and that the Barut-Girardello coherent states merely go over to the vacuum in the large
k limit. Finally, we examine the correct limiting procedure for obtaining separable states (i.e., products of coherent states) upon beam splitting by performing contractions of the su(2) and su(1,1) Lie algebras and of their associated coherent states.
We test the idea that transformations which, at the classical level, can be interpreted as evolutions are represented within quantum mechanics by unitary operators. To this end, we consider non-trivial canonical transformations which leave invariant the form of the Hamilton function of a system. We demonstrate that infinite families of such transformations exist for a variety of familiar conservative systems of one degree of freedom. We show how the precise form of integral equations for the stationary state wavefunctions implied by the existence of these canonical transformations can be pinned down by exploiting the algebra of the transformations and a symmetry of their generating functions. We recover several integral equations found in the literature on standard special functions of mathematical physics. We find that when one of the classical canonical transformations we consider is non-linear, its quantum implementation is non-unitary. We end with some comments on the implications of our findings for semiclassical studies and a brief discussion relevant to string theory of the generalization to scalar field theories in 1 + 1 dimensions.