Past exam of the theoretical physics II course of the University of Cambridge / 2015 / Paper 1 / 4 / d / Solution

First trace the state explicitly specified in (c). orthogonality in the $y$ oscillator removes terms with different occupation numbers:For a thermal oscillator of frequency $\omega$, the ratio of successive Boltzmann weights is $e^{-\hslash \omega /(k_{B}T)}$. Consequently the conditional answer for that two-mode squeezed state isAt $\theta =0$ this is interpreted by the limit $T_{\mathrm{sq}}=0$. The reduced state is mixed for nonzero squeezing although the joint state is pure; its effective thermal statistics arise from entanglement, not from heating by a bath.

The ground-state identification must still be qualified. For the true coordinate-coupled ground state, direct normal-mode averages giveTheir ratio is $m^2{\omega }_{+}{\omega }_{-}$, rather than $m^2{\omega }^2$. Therefore this reduced state is not thermal with respect to the original bare frequency $\omega$ for $k\ne 0$. It does have an exact thermal representation for an effective oscillator of mass $m$ and frequencyThe corresponding occupation basis is that of $\nu$, not that of the original $a$. This follows by matching the Gaussian variances to $⟨x^2⟩=\hslash \coth [\hslash \nu /(2k_{B}T)]/(2m\nu )$ and its momentum counterpart. A direct reduced-Gaussian eigenfunction calculation gives the same effective frequency and geometric eigenvalues.^[ref]