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Optics Express

Polarization versus photon spin

Alfredo Luis, Alfonso Rodil

Published Jan 15, 2014• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We examine whether the Stokes parameters of a two-mode electromagnetic field results from the superposition of the spins of the photons it contains. To this end we express any n-photon state as the result of the action on the vacuum of n creation operators generating photons which can have may different polarization states in general. We find that the macroscopic polarization holds as sum of the single-photon Stokes parameters only for the SU(2) orbits of photon-number states. The states that lack this property are entangled in every basis of independent field modes, so this is a class of entanglement beyond the reach of SU(2) transformations.

DOI
10.1364/oe.22.001569

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We examine whether the Stokes parameters of a two-mode electromagnetic field results from the superposition of the spins of the photons it contains. To this end we express any n-photon state as the result of the action on the vacuum of n creation operators generating photons which can have may different polarization states in general. We find that the macroscopic polarization holds as sum of the single-photon Stokes parameters only for the SU(2) orbits of photon-number states. The states that lack this property are entangled in every basis of independent field modes, so this is a class of entanglement beyond the reach of SU(2) transformations.
We show that the quantum Stokes parameters aptly describe the nonclassical two-polarization-mode Fock states and the transformation of their polarization states. In this description, the two-polarization-mode Fock states are the simultaneous eigenstates of the first and second Stokes parameters. Transformations of the polarization states, which are caused, for example, by optically active media, are described by the rotations in the Stokes vector space, which are given by unitary operators generated from the Hermitian Stokes parameters. The SU(2) symmetry of the Stokes parameters provides two independent degrees of freedom of polarimetric measurements that can exceed the standard quantum limit.
Abstract We present a new approach to Stokes parameters, which enables one to see better non-classical properties of bright quantum light, and of undefined overall photon numbers. The crucial difference is as follows. The standard quantum optical Stokes parameters are averages of differences of intensities of light registered at the two exits of polarization analyzers, and one gets their normalized version by dividing them by the average total intensity. The new ones are averages of the registered normalized Stokes parameters, for the duration of the experiment. That is, we redefine each Stokes observable as the difference of photon number operators at the two exits of a polarizing beam splitter multiplied by the inverse of their sum. The vacuum eigenvalue of the operator is defined a zero. We show that with such an approach one can obtain more sensitive entanglement indicators based on polarization measurements.
It is shown that the description of polarization based on quantization of classical Stokes parameters is incomplete in quantum domain. For example, the polarization of the electric dipole radiation of the atomic or molecular transitions is described by nine generators of the SU(3) subalgebra in the Weyl-Heisenberg algebra of photons, in other words, by nine independent Stokes operators instead of four dependent classical Stokes parameters. Although some of the Stokes operators have one and the same averages, they describe absolutely different physical quantities with strongly different quantum fluctuations. The quantum polarization properties of the electric dipole and quadrupole radiation are examined as a function of distance for the near, intermediate, and far zones. Application of results in the near-field optics and quantum entanglement research is discussed.
Polarization has been used extensively in quantum information processing, and quantum entanglement is essential to many areas of research, including quantum computing. Here we investigate the degree of polarization and the entanglement of a family of quantum states known as photon-added entangled coherent states. Such states could serve as means of entanglement distribution and quantum key distribution. Using the quantum Stokes parameters and the Q function, we demonstrated that, in general, the polarization of a superposition of two two-mode photon-added coherent states increases significantly with the number of added photons. And using the concurrence, we showed that the amount of entanglement in this kind of superposition presents a behavior that is dependent on whether or not the number of added photons on each mode is the same.
In a general form, three-photon polarization states are superpositions of contributions from four three-photon polarization modes with four arbitrary complex coefficients. Entanglement of such states is defined as entanglement between their one-photon and two-photon parts. The degree of entanglement is found explicitly in terms of such entanglement quantifiers as the generalized concurrence, entropy of reduced states and the Schmidt parameter. Polarization Stokes vectors, as well as the Schmidt decompositions of three-photon states are found and discussed. Similarity and differences with respect to biphoton polarization states are discussed too.