Quantum state reconstruction of the single-photon Fock state.
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.
Lvovsky
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AI
Fachbereich Physik, Universität Konstanz, D-78457 Konstanz, Germany. Alex.Lvovsky@uni-konstanz.de
Hansen
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H
Aichele
T
T
Benson
O
O
Mlynek
J
J
Schiller
S
S