On the zeros of the stellar representation in the discrete cylinder

Abstract

The discrete cylinder phase space offers a natural setting for twisted photons, Josephson junctions, and certain bosonic codes. In that context, we build a number-of-zeros hierarchy for the stellar distribution of states on the discrete cylinder phase space, tied to usefulness for quantum computation. The orbital angular momentum (OAM) and phase eigenstate, having no zeros, sits at the bottom of the hierarchy and share mathematical properties with the coherent state on the plane phase space, both sharing zero rank and a positive Wigner distribution. This reveals a structural peculiarity of the cylinder: its coherent state---the wrapped coherent state---is instead the most quantum, carrying infinitely many zeros, so "coherent state" need not signal classicality across different phase-space geometries. We identify the operations that preserve or change the zero count, giving explicit access to every rank of the hierarchy. We then ask whether this hierarchy also governs localization. Using the $L^r$ norm, the inverse participation ratio, and the Wehrl entropy as complementary measures of spread in the Husimi density, we find that the two hierarchies need not track one another: the wrapped coherent state can be more localized than the OAM eigenstate even though it carries infinitely many zeros.