Spectrum-Generating Superalgebra for Linear Harmonic Oscillators

Abstract: We show that the Hilbert space of the standard linear harmonic oscillator is a complete orbit of the osp(2,1;2) spectrum-generating superalgebra, and that this is the smallest such algebraic structure. The ubiquitous appearance of the linear harmonic oscillator in virtually all domains of theoretical physics guarantees a corresponding ubiquity of appropriate generalizations of this spectrum-generating superalgebra.