title: Wigner Distribution of Twisted Photons.
abstract: We present the first experimental characterization of the azimuthal Wigner distribution of a photon. Our protocol fully characterizes the transverse structure of a photon in conjugate bases of orbital angular momentum (OAM) and azimuthal angle. We provide a test of our protocol by characterizing pure superpositions and incoherent mixtures of OAM modes in a seven-dimensional space. The time required for performing measurements in our scheme scales only linearly with the dimension size of the state under investigation. This time scaling makes our technique suitable for quantum information applications involving a large number of OAM states.
authors.affiliation: The Institute of Optics, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627, USA.
authors.forename: Mohammad
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Mirhosseini
authors.affiliation: The Institute of Optics, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627, USA.
authors.forename: Omar S
authors.initials: OS
authors.lastname: Magaña-Loaiza
authors.affiliation: The Institute of Optics, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627, USA.
authors.forename: Changchen
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: The Institute of Optics, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627, USA.
authors.forename: Seyed Mohammad
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: Hashemi Rafsanjani
authors.affiliation: The Institute of Optics, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627, USA.|Department of Physics and Max Planck Centre for Extreme and Quantum Photonics, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario K1N 6N5, Canada.
authors.forename: Robert W
authors.initials: RW
authors.lastname: Boyd