[Physics] Coherent State, Unitary Operators, Harmonic Oscillator

coherent-stateshomework-and-exercisesoperatorsquantum mechanics

Consider the operator:

$$O = e^{\theta(a^\dagger b – b^\dagger a)}$$

where $\theta$ is a constant.

$O$ is a unitary operator.

$a$, $a^\dagger$, $b$, and $b^\dagger$ are ladder operators for two harmonic oscillators.

A normalized coherent state is defined as:

$$\lvert\alpha\rangle = e^{-\lvert\alpha\rvert^2/2} e^{\alpha a^\dagger} \lvert 0\rangle$$

where $\lvert0\rangle$ is the ground state of the harmonic oscillator.

I'm trying to see how $O$ acts on the coherent states by calculating $O \lvert\psi\rangle = O\lvert\alpha\rangle\lvert\beta\rangle$ in terms of coherent states.

Also, how does $O$ act on $\alpha$ and $\beta$?

I'm trying to use

$$O a O^\dagger = a \cos(\theta) + b \sin(\theta)$$

and

$$O b O^\dagger = -a \sin(\theta) + b \cos(\theta).$$

Best Answer

There are many ways to go around this. You can start from the coherent states and apply the unitary $\hat{O}$ directly on them. That will not be that simple because you will get a term $\hat{O}e^{\alpha\hat{a}^\dagger}e^{\beta\hat{b}^\dagger}$. Now, the typical approach would be to exchange the order of the operators to get something like $e^{\alpha\hat{a}^\dagger}e^{\beta\hat{b}^\dagger}\hat{O}$ (up to some extra term due to the commutator). This not really a simple task but once you are done, you can Taylor expand the operator $\hat{O}$ and keep only the zeroth order (all other terms contain annihilation operators acting on vacuum). I am not going to dig into the calculation in more detail, there are many ways to do it and none of them is really pleasant.

But there is a better way. You can define a displacement operator by the action $\hat{D}(\alpha)|0\rangle = |\alpha\rangle$ and then you have $\hat{D}(\alpha)\hat{a}\hat{D}^\dagger(\alpha) = \hat{a}+\alpha$. You can combine this with the formulas for $\hat{O}\hat{a}\hat{O}^\dagger$, $\hat{O}\hat{b}\hat{O}^\dagger$ to see how the annihilation operators are transformed. What you should get is a beam-splitting of the two coherent states, i.e., $$|\alpha,\beta\rangle\to|t\alpha+r\beta,t\beta-r\alpha\rangle$$, where $t = \cos\theta$, $r = \sin\theta$.