English

Gaussian versus non-Gaussian filtering of phase-insensitive nonclassicality

Quantum Physics 2021-05-11 v3

Abstract

Measures of quantum properties are essential to understanding the fundamental differences between quantum and classical systems as well as quantifying resources for quantum technologies. Here two broad classes of bosonic phase-space functions, which are filtered versions of the Glauber-Sudarshan PP function, are compared with regard to their ability to uncover nonclassical effects of light through their negativities. Gaussian filtering of the PP function yields the family of ss-parametrized quasiprobabilities, while more powerful regularized nonclassicality quasiprobabilities are obtained by non-Gaussian filtering. A method is proposed to directly sample such phase-space functions for the restricted case of phase-independent quantum states from balanced homodyne measurements. This overcomes difficulties of previous approaches that manually append uniformly distributed optical phases to the measured quadrature data. We experimentally demonstrate this technique for heralded single- and two-photon states using balanced homodyne detection with varying efficiency. The ss-parametrized quasiprobabilities, which can be directly sampled, are non-negative for detection efficiencies below 0.5. By contrast, we show that significant negativities of non-Gaussian filtered quasiprobabilities uncover nonclassical effects even for low efficiencies.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2010.02173,
  title  = {Gaussian versus non-Gaussian filtering of phase-insensitive nonclassicality},
  author = {Benjamin Kühn and Werner Vogel and Valérian Thiel and Sofiane Merkouche and Brian J. Smith},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.02173},
  year   = {2021}
}