Direct photon detection is experimentally implemented to measure the squeezing and purity of a single-mode squeezed vacuum state without an interferometric homodyne detection. Following a recent theoretical proposal [arXiv quant-ph/0311119], the setup only requires a tunable beamsplitter and a single-photon detector to fully characterize the generated Gaussian states. The experimental implementation of this procedure is discussed and compared with other reference methods.
@article{arxiv.quant-ph/0403234,
title = {Pulsed squeezed vacuum characterization without homodyning},
author = {J. Wenger and J. Fiurasek and R. Tualle-Brouri and N. J. Cerf and Ph. Grangier},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:quant-ph/0403234},
year = {2009}
}