Abstract

The problem of phase in quantum mechanics is an old one but one that has received increasing attention of late. For a single-mode radiation field with annihilation operator â there have been two recent formulations for its quantum phase, Pegg and Bamett¹ have created a Hermitian phase operator ${\widehat{\varphi }}_s$ by truncating the state space associated with â to the subspace spanned by the number kets {|n〉:0 ≤ n ≤ S}.

© 1990 Optical Society of America