Tomographic reconstruction of quantum states in N spatial dimensions

Abstract

Most quantum tomographic methods can only be used for one-dimensional problems. We show how to infer the quantum state of a non-relativistic N-dimensional harmonic oscillator system by simple inverse Radon transforms. The procedure is equally applicable to finding the joint quantum state of several distinguishable particles in different harmonic oscillator potentials. A requirement of the procedure is that the angular frequencies of the N harmonic potentials are incommensurable. We discuss what kind of information can be found if the requirement of incommensurability is not fulfilled and also under what conditions the state can be reconstructed from finite time measurements. As a further example of quantum state reconstruction in N dimensions we consider the two related cases of an N-dimensional free particle with periodic boundary conditions and a particle in an N-dimensional box, where we find a similar condition of incommensurability and finite recurrence time for the one-dimensional system.