Quantum state reconstruction of the single-photon Fock state
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.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.quant-ph/0101051,
title = {Quantum state reconstruction of the single-photon Fock state},
author = {A. I. Lvovsky and H. Hansen and T. Aichele and O. Benson and J. Mlynek and S. Schiller},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:quant-ph/0101051},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
4 pages, 4 figures, to appear in Physical Review Letters. Avoid downloading PDF due to extremely poor figure resolution. Use Postscript