Casimir invariants for systems undergoing collective motion

Dicke states are an important class of states which exhibit collective behavior in many-body systems. They are interesting because (1) the decay rates of these states can be quite different from a set of independently evolving particles and (2) a particular class of these states are decoherence-free or noiseless with respect to a set of errors. These noiseless states, or more generally subsystems, avoid certain types of errors in quantum-information-processing devices. Here we provide a method for determining a set of transformations of these states which leave the states in their subsystems but still enable them to evolve in particular ways. For subsystems of particles undergoing collective motions, these transformations can be calculated by using essentially the same construction which is used to determine the famous Casimir invariants for quantum systems. Such invariants can be used to determine a complete set of commuting observables for a class of Dicke states as well as to identify possible logical operations for decoherence-free-noiseless subsystems. Our method is quite general and provides results for cases where the constituent particles have more than two internal states.