Quantum state reconstruction of the single-photon Fock state

2001/01/31 by A. I. Lvovsky, H. Hansen, T. Aichele +3 · 4 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #quant-ph

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.87.050402

published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 87, 050402 (2001) · 4 pages, 4 figures, to appear in Physical Review Letters. Avoid downloading PDF due to extremely poor figure resolution. Use Postscript

arxiv created 2001/06/15 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01

Abstract

We have reconstructed the quantum state of optical pulses containing single photons using the method of phase-randomized pulsed optical homodyne tomography. The single-photon Fock state |1> was prepared using conditional measurements on photon pairs born in the process of parametric down-conversion. A probability distribution of the phase-averaged electric field amplitudes with a strongly non-Gaussian shape is obtained with the total detection efficiency of (55+-1)%. The angle-averaged Wigner function reconstructed from this distribution shows a strong dip reaching classically impossible negative values around the origin of the phase space.

Cited by

• Operational detection of Wigner negativity in arbitrary quantum states from few copies
• Heralding probability optimization for nonclassical light generated by photon counting measurements on multimode Gaussian states
• Numerical Derivatives, Projection Coefficients, and Truncation Errors in Analytic Hilbert Space With Gaussian Measure
• The stellar decomposition of Gaussian quantum states