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Chapter 3: Coherent States

Chapter 3: Coherent States

pp. 50-88

Authors

, Lehman College, City University of New York, , Imperial College London and the UK National Physical Laboratory
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Extract

In this chapter we introduce the Glauber coherent states of a quantized field as eigenstates of the annihilation operator and as displaced vacuum states. The phase-space picture of coherent states is introduced, along with phase-space probability distributions, namely the Q distribution, the P distribution, and the Wigner function, and their interrelations are discussed.

Keywords

  • coherent states
  • displaced vacuum
  • phase space
  • Wigner function

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