Displacement operator
The displacement operator for one mode in quantum optics is the shift operator
where is the amount of displacement in optical phase space,
is the complex conjugate of that displacement, and
and
are the lowering and raising operators, respectively.
The name of this operator is derived from its ability to displace a localized state in phase space by a magnitude
. It may also act on the vacuum state by displacing it into a coherent state. Specifically,
where
is a coherent state, which is the eigenstates of the annihilation (lowering) operator.