Departamento de Óptica, Facultad de Ciencias Físicas, Universidad Complutense, 28040 Madrid, Spain.
Arbeitsgruppe Theoretische Quantenoptik, Institut für Physik, Universität Rostock, D-18051 Rostock, Germany.
Phys Rev Lett. 2015 Mar 13;114(10):103602. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.103602. Epub 2015 Mar 11.
Systems of on-off detectors are well established for measuring radiation fields in the regime of small photon numbers. We propose to combine these detector systems with unbalanced homodyning with a weak local oscillator. This approach yields phase-space functions, which represent the click counterpart of the s parametrized quasiprobabilities of standard photoelectric detection theory. This introduced class of distributions can be directly sampled from the measured click-counting statistics. Therefore, our technique visualizes nonclassical effects without further data processing. Surprisingly, a small number of on-off diodes can yield more insight than perfect photon number resolution. Quantum signatures in the particle and wave domain of the quantized radiation field, as shown by photon number and squeezed states, respectively, will be uncovered in terms of negativities of the sampled phase-space functions. Application in the vast fields of quantum optics and quantum technology will benefit from our efficient nonclassicality characterization approach.
用于在小光子数范围内测量辐射场的开-关探测器系统已经得到很好的确立。我们建议将这些探测器系统与不平衡的同频外差探测与弱本地振荡器相结合。这种方法产生的相空间函数表示标准光电探测理论的 s 参数化准概率的点击对应物。引入的这一类分布可以直接从测量的点击计数统计数据中进行采样。因此，我们的技术无需进一步的数据处理即可直观地显示非经典效应。令人惊讶的是，少量的开-关二极管可以提供比完美的光子数分辨率更多的信息。量子签名将分别以光子数和压缩态的形式在量子辐射场的粒子域和波域中被揭示，这将根据采样相空间函数的负值来揭示。我们的高效非经典特征化方法将使量子光学和量子技术的广泛领域受益。
