Development of linear canonical transforms: A historical sketch

Abstract

Linear canonical transformations (LCTs) were introduced almost simultaneously during the early 1970s by Stuart A. Collins Jr. in paraxial optics, and independently by Marcos Moshinsky and Christiane Quesne in quantum mechanics, to understand the conservation of information and of uncertainty under linear maps of phase space. Only in the 1990s did both sources begin to be referred jointly in the growing literature, which has expanded into a field common to applied optics, mathematical physics, and analogic and digital signal analysis. In this introductory chapter we recapitulate the construction of the LCT integral transforms, detailing their Lie-algebraic relation with second-order differential operators, which is the origin of the metaplectic phase. Radial and hyperbolic LCTs are reviewed as unitary integral representations of the two-dimensional symplectic group, with complex extension to a semigroup for systems with loss or gain. Some of the more recent developments on discrete and finite analogues of LCTs are commented with their concomitant problems, whose solutions and alternatives are contained the body of this book.