Abstract
The method which is the subject of this book originated from the early times of quantum mechanics. In 1926, Schrödinger [1] first introduced a system of nonorthogonal wave functions to describe nonspreading wave packets for quantum oscillators. A few years later, in the famous book by von Neumann [2], an important subset of these wave functions was considered, which was related to the partitioning of the phase plane of a one-dimensional dynamical system into regular cells. Von Neumann used this subset to investigate the coordinate and momentum measurement processes in quantum theory. For a considerable time these ideas of the eminent scientists did not attract undue attention. It was only in the early sixties that the approach was thoroughly studied [3–6]. Glauber [7,8] named the states invented by Schrödinger the coherent states (CS) and showed that they are adequate to describe a coherent laser beam in the framework of quantum theory.
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© 1986 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Perelomov, A. (1986). Introduction. In: Generalized Coherent States and Their Applications. Texts and Monographs in Physics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-61629-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-61629-7_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-64891-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-61629-7
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