Operational approach to the quantum phase

Charles H. Randall, David J. Foulis

G. M. Saxena

We define quantum phase in terms of inverses of annihilation and creation operators. We show that like Susskind - Glogower phase operators, the measured phase operators and the unitary phase operators can be defined in terms of the inverse operators. However, for the unitary phase operator the Hilbert space includes the negative energy states. The quantum phase in inverse operator representation may find the applications in the field of quantum optics particularly in the squeezed states.

GERD RÖPKE

Biswajit Das, B. Ghosal, Subhasish Dutta Gupta +1 more

We introduce unitary quantum phase operators for material particles. We carry out a model study on quantum phases of interacting bosons in a symmetric double-well potential in terms of unitary and commonly-used non-unitary phase operators and compare the results for different number of bosons. We find that the results for unitary quantum phase operators are significantly different from those for non-unitary ones especially in the case of low number of bosons. We introduce unitary operators corresponding to the quantum phase-difference between two single-particle states of fermions. As an application of fermionic phase operators, we study a simple model of a pair of interacting two-component fermions in a symmetric double-well potential. We also investigate quantum phase and number fluctuations to ascertain number-phase uncertainty in terms of unitary phase operators.

Juha-Pekka Pellonpää

We represent quantum phase observables as phase shift covariant normalized positive operator measures. The phase operators are the first moment operators of the phase observables. A phase operator determines the associated phase observable uniquely. We show that the Cahill–Glauber s -ordered phase operators are determined by phase shift covariant generalized operator measures, which are ordinary operator measures whenever Re s < 0 and phase observables when s ≤ −1. The Wigner–Weyl quantized phase operator is not determined by any phase observable. We investigate the classical limit of covariant (generalized) operator measures in coherent states.

J. Brooke