PHASE OPT IMIZED QUANTUM STATES OF L IGHT

We find the states of light which have minimum phase variance both for a given maximum energy state component and for a given mean energy. When these states contain sufficiently many photon umber state components, he number state coefficients approximate sinusoidal nd Airy functions respectively. The phase of these new states of light is much more sharply defined than is the phase of a coherent s ate with the same mean energy. Recently Pegg and Barnett [ 1] introduced a lim-iting procedure which allowed an hermitian phase operator to be included in the quantum theory of light. In this procedure, quantum mechanical cal-culations are carried out using a state space of s+ 1 dimensions, with the limit as s ~ends to infinity being found only after c-numbers uch as means and var-iances have been derived as a function of s. Prop-erties of the hermitian phase operator were subse-quently explored in detail [2,3]. The eigenstates of this operator have precisely defined phase, but thei