Coherent states for fractional powers of the harmonic oscillator Hamiltonian

TL;DR

This paper develops and compares methods for constructing coherent states for quantum systems with fractional powers of the harmonic oscillator Hamiltonian, crucial for semiclassical analysis of relativistic-inspired models.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized approach to coherent states for fractional Hamiltonians, extending Dirac quantization and group averaging, and proposes new states with better semiclassical properties.

Findings

Fractional coherent states can be constructed via generalized Dirac quantization.

Standard fractional Poisson-based states do not satisfy resolution of identity.

New fractional coherent states improve semiclassical approximation and satisfy resolution of identity.

Abstract

Inspired by special and general relativistic systems that can have Hamiltonians involving square roots, or more general fractional powers, in this article we address the question how a suitable set of coherent states for such systems can be obtained. This becomes a relevant topic if the semiclassical sector of a given quantum theory wants to be analysed. As a simple setup we consider the toy model of a deparametrised system with one constraint that involves a fractional power of the harmonic oscillator Hamiltonian operator and we discuss two approaches for finding suitable coherent states for this system. In the first approach we consider Dirac quantisation and group averaging that have been used by Ashtekar et. al. but only for integer powers of operators. Our generalisation to fractional powers yields in the case of the toy model a suitable set of coherent states. The second approach is inspired by coherent states based on a fractional Poisson distribution introduced by Laskin, which however turn out not to satisfy all properties to yield good semiclassical results for the operators considered here and in particular do not satisfy a resolution of identity as claimed. Therefore, we present a generalisation of the standard harmonic oscillator coherent states to states involving fractional labels, which approximate the fractional operators in our toy model semiclassically more accurately and satisfy a resolution of identity. In addition, motivated by the way the proof of the resolution of identity is performed, we consider these kind of coherent states also for the polymerised harmonic oscillator and discuss their semiclassical properties