immanants and their applications in quantum optics
abstract
the regular representation of sn appears quite naturally in the combinatorial problem
of the redistribution of quantum particles though an n-channel interferometer. by using
tools from representation theory, it has been shown that the coincidence rate can expressed
in terms of linear combinations of permuted immanants of the scattering matrix that
describes the interferometer. this thesis introduces the delay matrix, whose entries are
functions of the relative time delays between particles. the delay matrix is used with
gamas’ theorem to determine exactly which immanants appear in the coincidence rate
for a given set of time delays, which improves our understanding of the hong-ou-mandel
effect for many-particle systems. both bosonic and fermionic systems are considered in
this thesis.