The driven oscillator in the photon-number probability representation of quantum mechanics

Abstract

We study the evolution of the driven harmonic oscillator in the probability representation of quantum mechanics. We use the photon-number tomographic-probability-distribution function to describe the quantum states of the system. We give a general review of the photon-number tomographic framework, including a discussion on the connection with other representations of quantum mechanics. We find tomograms of coherent states as well as excited states of the harmonic oscillator in an explicit form. We discuss the time evolution of the photon-number tomograms and transforms of the propagators for different representations of quantum mechanics. We obtain the propagator for the photon-number tomographic-distribution function for the case of the driven oscillator in an explicit form.