QUANTUM-OPTICAL PHASE AND CANONICAL CONJUGATION

We use a new limiting procedure, developed to study quantumoptical phase, to examine canonically conjugate operators in general. We find that Dirac's assumption that photon number and phase should be canonically conjugate variables, similar to momentum and position, is essentially correct. The difficulties with Dirac's approach are shown to arise through use of a form of the canonical commutator which, although the only possible form in the usual infinite Hilbert space approach, is not sufficiently general to be used as a model for a number-phase commutator.The approach in this paper unifies the theory of conjugate operators, which include photon number and phase, angular momentum and angle, and momentum and position as particular cases. The usual position-momentum commutator is regained from a more generally applicable expression by means of a domain restriction which cannot be used for the phasenumber commutator. © 1990 Taylor & Francis Ltd.