Unitary Phase Operator in Quantum Mechanics
- 15 July 1988
- journal article
- Published by IOP Publishing in Europhysics Letters
- Vol. 6 (6) , 483-487
- https://doi.org/10.1209/0295-5075/6/6/002
Abstract
The difficulties in formulating a natural and simple operator description of the phase of a quantum oscillator or single-mode electromagnetic field have been known for some time. We present a unitary phase operator whose eigenstates are well-defined phase states and whose properties coincide with those normally associated with a phase. The corresponding phase eigenvalues form only a dense subset of the real numbers. A natural extension to the definition of a time-measurement operator yields a corresponding countable infinity of eigenvalues.Keywords
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