For those following along with my Quantum Optics class, here’s a bunch of lectures about photons:
- Lecture 7: Commutators, simple harmonic oscillators, creation and annihilation operators, photons.
- Lecture 8: Coherent states of the electromagnetic field.
- Lecture 9: Number-phase uncertainty, squeezed states, interferometry.
- Lecture 10: Photon anti-correlation revisited, beamsplitters and vacuum states.
This material, unsurprisingly, produced the most panicked looks from students to this point. One of the homework problems was also to recapticulate a couple of calculations from a Phys. Rev. A (Castin and Dalibard, PRA 55, 4330 (1997)), which I think is pretty cool, though I’m not sure they appreciate it.
Also, there’s a typo in the first lecture, due to copying some of my notes from a paper that uses “natural units” where the frequency is set equal to 1. I haven’t bothered fixing the PDF’s because, well, that would be a hassle.