| Quantum optics operators |
|---|
| Ladder operators |
| Creation and annihilation operators |
| Displacement operator |
| Rotation operator (quantum mechanics) |
| Squeeze operator |
| Anti-symmetric operator |
The displacement operator for one mode in quantum optics is the operator
,
where α is the amount of displacement in optical phase space,
is the complex conjugate of that displacement, and
and
are the lowering and raising operators, respectively. The name of this operator is derived from its ability to displace a localized state in phase space by a magnitude α. It may also act on the vacuum state by displacing it into a coherent state. Specifically,
where
is a coherent state. Displaced states are eigenfunctions of the annihilation (lowering) operator.
Contents |
Properties
The displacement operator is a unitary operator, and therefore obeys
, where I is the identity matrix. Since
, the hermitian conjugate of the displacement operator can also be interpreted as a displacement of opposite magnitude ( − α). The effect of applying this operator in a similarity transformation of the ladder operators results in their displacement.


The product of two displacement operators is another displacement operator , apart from a phase factor, has the total displacement as the sum of the two individual displacements. This can be seen by utilizing the Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff formula.
which shows us that:

When acting on an eigenket, the phase factor
appears in each term of the resulting state, which makes it physically irrelevant.[1]
Alternative expressions
Two alternative ways to express the displacement operator are:
Multimode displacement
The displacement operator can also be generalized to multimode displacement.
References
- ^ Gerry, Christopher, and Peter Knight: Introductory Quantum Optics. Cambridge (England): Cambridge UP, 2005.
Notes
See also
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