FINITE-DIMENSIONAL MATRIX REPRESENTATIONS AS CALCULATIONAL TOOLS IN QUANTUM OPTICS

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