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Why you should not use the electric field to quantize in nonlinear optics

Quantum Physics 2017-08-28 v2 Optics

Abstract

We show that using the electric field as a quantization variable in nonlinear optics leads to incorrect expressions for the squeezing parameters in spontaneous parametric down-conversion and conversion rates in frequency conversion. This observation is related to the fact that if the electric field is written as a linear combination of bosonic creation and annihilation operators one cannot satisfy Maxwell's equations in a nonlinear dielectric.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1707.01686,
  title  = {Why you should not use the electric field to quantize in nonlinear optics},
  author = {Nicolás Quesada and J. E. Sipe},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.01686},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

This version corrects a minor typo from the published version in Optics Letters. Eq. 22 should have an \epsilon_0 that is lacking in the OL version