Abstract

Several authors¹,² have studied the lossless beam splitter on a quantum mechanical basis. In this approach the action of the beam splitter is described by unitary transformations that act on the operators for the radiation fields present. In this paper we study quantum mechanically the general case of reflection and transmission from a boundary. We obtain the quantum analog of the classical Fresnel relations. We find that the general operators that describe reflection and transmission at a boundary are a series of unitary operators involving appropriate radiation fields. The generalization for the nonlinear media presents many interesting situations where the classical laws of reflection and refraction are modified. This provides an interesting description of phase conjugation.

© 1991 Optical Society of America