2006/10/05 by L. L. Sánchez-Soto, L. L. Sanchez-Soto, E. C. Yustas +3
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Orbital Angular Momentum in Optics #Quantum Information and Cryptography #Quantum Mechanics and Applications #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreva.76.043820
published as Phys. Rev. A 76, 043820 (2007) · 4 pages, 3 eps-color figures
arxiv created 2006/10/05 · openalex publication_date 2007/10/15 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The degree of polarization of a quantum field can be defined as its distance to an appropriate set of states. When we take unpolarized states as this reference set, the states optimizing this degree for a fixed average number of photons N present a fairly symmetric, parabolic photon statistic, with a variance scaling as N2. Although no standard optical process yields such a statistic, we show that, to an excellent approximation, a highly squeezed vacuum can be taken as maximally polarized. We also consider the distance of a field to the set of its SU(2) transformed, finding that certain linear superpositions of SU(2) coherent states make this degree to be unity.