title: Experimental characterization of bosonic creation and annihilation operators.
abstract: The photon creation and annihilation operators are cornerstones of the quantum description of the electromagnetic field. They signify the isomorphism of the optical Hilbert space to that of the harmonic oscillator and the bosonic nature of photons. We perform complete experimental characterization (quantum process tomography) of these operators. By measuring their effect on coherent states by means of homodyne tomography, we obtain their process tensor in the Fock basis, which explicitly shows the "raising" and "lowering" properties of these operators with respect to photon number states. This is the first experimental demonstration of complete tomography of nondeterministic quantum processes.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Quantum Information Science, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada T2N 1N4.
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Kumar
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Barrios
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Kupchak
authors.forename: A I
authors.initials: AI
authors.lastname: Lvovsky