Quantum superposition, coherence, and interference

L. E. Ballentine

Ángel S. Sanz, Salvador Miret-Artés

S. T. Gevorkyan, V. O. Chaltykyan

For the process of three-photon absorption in the case of a cubic parametric perturbation a possibility to obtain quantum superposition states of three coherent components is shown. The one-photon and two-photon absorption processes are shown to destroy the interference between the state components: the quantum superposition state decays into the classical mixture of its components. It is shown that the interference between different three-component coherent superposition states formed in the system can, depending on the initial state of the field, result in almost full localization of the optical system in a two-component state, or in destruction of the interference between different coherent components. The Wigner functions and quantum entropy of the system are calculated for a variety of initial states.

Z. Ficek, S. Swain, William T. Rhodes +9 more

Igor Jex, Vladimír Bužek

We show that multiphoton coherent states can be expressed as linear quantum superpositions of a finite number of generalized coherent states. Quantum interferences between component states lead to appearance of non-classical effects such as oscillations in the photon number distribution, quadrature squeezing, SU(1, 1) squeezing and others.