title: 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.
authors.affiliation: Fachbereich Physik, Universität Konstanz, D-78457 Konstanz, Germany. Alex.Lvovsky@uni-konstanz.de
authors.forename: A I
authors.initials: AI
authors.lastname: Lvovsky
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Hansen
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Aichele
authors.forename: O
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Benson
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Mlynek
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Schiller