Generalised ladder operators, degeneracy and coherent states in two-dimensional quantum mechanics
In this thesis we discuss degeneracy and the construction of generalised coherent states in two-dimensional quantum systems. We develop a scheme for defining non-degenerate spectra and the corresponding averaged energy eigenstates. When the degeneracy in the spectrum
is linear in the quantum numbers, we are able to define generalised ladder operators which lead to a chain of states with a natural set of coefficients. Additionally, we are able to recover completeness relations for the generalised states. On the other hand, when the spectrum is quadratic in the quantum numbers, we utilise some results from number theory to categorise the degeneracy and correspondingly the averaged energy eigenstates. In particular we study the two-dimensional isotropic and anisotropic oscillators as well the two-dimensional Morse potential and its non-separable supersymmetric partner. In all cases, we compute the coherent states and discuss certain aspects of their non-classicality. We find squeezing between conjugate quadratures, non-trivial dependence of the quadrature variances on the parameters introduced when defining the non-degenerate spectra, and non-localisation of wavefunctions. As an application, we study the problem of quantisation and semiclassical phase space analysis in two dimensions by exploiting the completeness of generalised families of two-dimensional squeezed coherent states.
