Complementarity and Phase Distributions for Angular Momentum Systems

Abstract

Interferences in the distributions of complementary variables for angular momentum - two level systems are discussed. A quantum phase distribution is introduced for angular momentum. Explicit results for the phase distributions and the number distributions for atomic coherent states, squeezed states and superpositions of coherent states are given. These results clearly demonstrate the issue of complementarity and provide us with results analogous to those for the radiation field.

9 pages, 3 figures available on request, replaced with minor typos corrected in abstract, to appear in Physics Letters A