Glauber-Sudarshan P-representation

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The Glauber-Sudarshan P-representation is a way of writing down the state of any type of light using the coherent states as a basis. It was developed by George Sudarshan and later adopted by Roy J. Glauber (see the references below). It was the subject of a controversy when Glauber was awarded a share of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in this field and Sudarshan's contribution was not recognized.

In this representation, the density matrix is written as:

\widehat{\rho} = \int \varphi(\alpha) |{\alpha}\rangle \langle {\alpha}|\ d^{2}\alpha,\,

where \scriptstyle|\alpha\rangle\, are the coherent states and \scriptstyle\varphi(\alpha) \, is a quasi-probability distribution.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  • E. C. G. Sudarshan, Phys. Rev. Letters 10, 277 (1963)
  • Roy J. Glauber, Physical Review 131, 2766 (1963)
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