FINITE-DIMENSIONAL MATRIX REPRESENTATIONS AS CALCULATIONAL TOOLS IN QUANTUM OPTICS

A powerful operator-algebra technique is used to calculate several use ful relations encountered in quantum optics, such as the disentangling of the squeezing operator. The technique uses a faithful finite dimen sional matrix representation of a Lie algebra to perform representatio n-independent calculations and often requires considerably less comput ation than other methods. While it has had little exposure within the quantum optics community, the method is quite popular with mathematica l physicists in field theory.