On the diagonalization of quadratic Hamiltonians
quant-ph
/ Authors
/ Abstract
A new procedure to diagonalize quadratic Hamiltonians is introduced. We show that one can find a unitary transformation such that the transformed quadratic Hamiltonian is diagonal but still written in terms of the original position and momentum observables. We give a general method to diagonalize an arbitrary quadratic Hamiltonian and derive a few of the simplest special cases in detail.