The General Form of non-Fock Coherent Boson States

Abstract

Specifying their (normally ordered) characteristic functions we determine all states of the boson C*-Weyl algebra which satisfy Glauber's coherence condition and are not realizable as density operators in Fock space. The pure ones are shown to be just the eigenstates of the annihilation operators in their GNS-representations (in contrast to the Fock case) and are characterized in many equivalent manners. The central decomposition of an arbitrary coherent state has the macroscopic phase variable as parameter and is supported by the pure coherent states, which is in fact the only way for a maximal decomposition. The set of all coherent states with the same absolute factorizing function is proven to be a Bauer simplex. The appearence of a classical coherent field part is studied in detail in the GNS-representations and shown to correspond to an enlargement of the set of one boson states by just one additional mode.