Phase Resolution and Coherent Phase States

Various measures of phase resolution (including variance, entropy, confidence half-width, and reciprocal peak likelihood) are reviewed, and applied to the class of coherent phase states. These states arise naturally as eigenstates of the Susskind-Glogower phase operator, and are found to have near-optimal phase resolution properties for fixed mean photon number [nbar]. The mutual information for a communication channel based on coherent phase states is calculated as log ([nbar] + 1), within 1·5 bits of the theoretical maximum for single-mode channels.