The Barut–Girardello coherent states

Abstract

It is shown that the completeness problem of the SL(2, R) coherent states proposed by Barut and Girardello leads to a moment problem, not a Mellin transform. This moment problem, which also appears in the theory of para-Bose oscillators, has been solved following the Sharma–Mehta–Mukunda–Sudarshan solution of the problem. The matrix element of finite transformation in the coherent state basis is shown to satisfy a ‘‘quasiorthogonality’’ condition analogous to the orthogonality condition of the matrix element in the canonical basis. Finally, the Barut–Girardello ‘‘Hilbert space of entire analytic functions of growth (1,1)’’ turns out to be only a subspace of Bargmann’s well-known Hilbert space of analytic functions. This subspace, which has been called ‘‘the reduced Bargmann space’’ in a previous paper, is an invariant subspace of SL(2,R). With this identification the generators of the group in this realization turn out to be the well-known boson operators of Holman and Biedenharn.