Quantum optical phase
The concepts of intensity and phase of optical fields have a well-defined
meaning in classical optics. It was thus quite natural, in quantum optics,
to associate the photon number operator with the intensity of the field
and somehow construct the phase operator conjugate to the number operator.
The latter task, however, turned out not to be easy.
Introduction by Pegg and Barnett of the Hermitian phase operator revived
the interest in the quantum phase problem and a lot of papers appeared in the
last few years that dealt with various aspects of the quantum phase problem.
Now, the Reader can find a few articles reviewing the subject, e.g.,
- R. Lynch, The quantum phase problem: A critical review,
Phys. Rep. 256, 367, 1995
- R. Tanas, A. Miranowicz, and Ts. Gantsog, Quantum phase properties of
nonlinear optical phenomena, in Progress in Optics volume XXXV,
ed. E. Wolf, Elsevier Science, Amsterdam, 1996, pp. 355-446
- D. T. Pegg and S. M. Barnett, Tutorial review: Quantum optical phase,
J. Mod. Optics, 44, 225-264, 1997
The extensive bibliography of the subject can be found in the above review
articles. Since we have collected a lot of papers related to the quantum phase
problem in the BibTeX format when writing our review, I have updated our
bibliographical database by including the papers found in the Pegg-Barnett
review and made it available on the web both in the .html and .bib format.
I realize that the the bibliography is not complete, but it now contains over 500 entries, and, I hope, it can be helpful to anybody interested in the quantum phase problems. I am ready to add any papers that are still missing in the base if you send me the data.
Here you can see/download the list of our own papers on the subject as well as
the general quantum phase bibliography:
-
Our contributions
- Quantum optical phase bibliography
Last Update - March 17, 1997