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Physical Review A

Quasiprobabilities and the nonclassicality of fields

József Janszky, Min Kim, M. S. Kim

Published Jan 1, 1996• 32 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The existence of positive well-defined quasiprobabilities is known to be related to the measure of nonclassicality for a given field state. We test the coincidence of the loss of well-known nonclassical properties with the appearance of the positive well-defined quasiprobabilities for various fields influenced by phase-insensitive reservoirs. For Gaussian fields the appearance of a positive Glauber-Sudarshan P function coincides with the loss of nonclassical properties in quadrature fluctuations and in photon statistics. We find that when an initial Fock state dissipates or is amplified the initial field loses its nonclassicality in photon statistics before the P function becomes positive, which is different from the Gaussian field. The Wigner function may be positive even when the decaying Fock state is sub-Poissonian. For the amplification of the Fock state, however, the Wigner function is positive only when the field is super-Poissonian. For the dissipation and amplification of the Fock state the point when a certain quasiprobability function becomes positive definite depends only on the average number of photons N of the heat bath. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.53.502

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The existence of positive well-defined quasiprobabilities is known to be related to the measure of nonclassicality for a given field state. We test the coincidence of the loss of well-known nonclassical properties with the appearance of the positive well-defined quasiprobabilities for various fields influenced by phase-insensitive reservoirs. For Gaussian fields the appearance of a positive Glauber-Sudarshan P function coincides with the loss of nonclassical properties in quadrature fluctuations and in photon statistics. We find that when an initial Fock state dissipates or is amplified the initial field loses its nonclassicality in photon statistics before the P function becomes positive, which is different from the Gaussian field. The Wigner function may be positive even when the decaying Fock state is sub-Poissonian. For the amplification of the Fock state, however, the Wigner function is positive only when the field is super-Poissonian. For the dissipation and amplification of the Fock state the point when a certain quasiprobability function becomes positive definite depends only on the average number of photons N of the heat bath. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.
The definition of nonclassical states in quantum optics by the nonpositivity of their Glauber–Sudarshan quasiprobability is investigated and it is shown that it hides some serious problems. It leads to a subdivision of squeezed thermal states into classical and nonclassical states which is difficult to interpret physically by some qualitatively different behaviour of the states. Nonclassical states are found in arbitrarily small neighbourhoods of every classical state that is illustrated by a very artificial modified thermal state. The observability of the criterion in comparison to that for nonclassicality of states determined by the nearest Hilbert–Schmidt distance to a class of reference states is discussed. The behaviour of the nonclassicality of states in models of phase-insensitive processes of damping and amplification is investigated and it is found that every nonclassical state eventually makes a transition to a classical state. However, this is not specific for the negativities or singularities of the Glauber–Sudarshan quasiprobability and is found in similar form for other quasiprobabilities, for example, for the Wigner quasiprobability. We discuss in quite general form some defects of the Glauber–Sudarshan quasiprobability if compared with classical distribution functions over the phase space, in particular the failure of an earlier advertised superposition formula.
We investigate the loss of nonclassicality and non-Gaussianity of a single-mode state of the radiation field in contact with a thermal reservoir. The damped density matrix for a Fock-diagonal input is written using the Weyl expansion of the density operator. Analysis of the evolution of the quasiprobability densities reveals the existence of two successive characteristic times of the reservoir which are sufficient to assure the positivity of the Wigner function and, respectively, of the PPP representation. We examine the time evolution of non-Gaussianity using three recently introduced distance-type measures. They are based on the Hilbert-Schmidt metric, the relative entropy, and the Bures metric. Specifically, for an MMM-photon-added thermal state, we obtain a compact analytic formula of the time-dependent density matrix that is used to evaluate and compare the three non-Gaussianity measures. We find a good consistency of these measures on the sets of damped states. The explicit damped quasiprobability densities are shown to support our general findings regarding the loss of negativities of Wigner and PPP functions during decoherence. Finally, we point out that Gaussification of the attenuated field mode is accompanied by a nonmonotonic evolution of the von Neumann entropy of its state conditioned by the initial value of the mean photon number.
Using the Wigner function formalism in phase space, we analyze the decay of quantum coherences in phase-sensitive reservoirs. We show that the decay rate of quantum coherences in phase-sensitive reservoirs can be significantly modified compared to the decay rate in ordinary (phase-insensitive) thermal reservoirs. Depending on the phases of the quantum system (field mode) and the squeezed reservoir, the decay rate of the quantum coherence can be either enhanced or significantly suppressed, which is in agreement with the results obtained recently by other methods [T. A. B. Kennedy and D. F. Walls, Phys. Rev. A 37, 152 (1988)]. We show that in an ideally squeezed reservoir with a high degree of squeezing, the decay rate of the quantum coherence (i.e., the decay rate of off-diagonal terms of the density matrix in the coherent-state basis) can be equal to the decay rate of the energy of the system (i.e., the decay rate of diagonal terms of the density matrix). Suppression of the decay rate of the quantum coherence leads to preservation of nonclassical effects such as the oscillations in the photon number distribution. Moreover, we find that some initial superposition states of light exhibiting super-Poissonian photon statistics can be transformed into intermediate sub-Poissonian states under the influence of phase-sensitive reservoirs.
We consider nonclassical properties of the field at the output of an amplifier under the operational condition that the output exhibits neither squeezing nor sub-Poissonian statistics but has the nonclassical P function. We also present explicit results for the output P function when the input is strictly a quantum-mechanical state similar to a Fock state. The nonclassical properties of the marginal distribution associated with the output are derived. The domain where the marginal distribution remains nonclassical is different from the domain over which the output P function is nonclassical. The amplifier is shown to be a useful device for direct measurements of the quasiprobabilities.
The algebraic quantification of nonclassicality, which naturally arises from the quantum superposition principle, is related to properties of regular nonclassicality quasiprobabilities. The latter are obtained by non-Gaussian filtering of the Glauber-Sudarshan PPP function. They yield lower bounds for the degree of nonclassicality. We also derive bounds for convex combinations of Gaussian states for certifying quantum non-Gaussianity directly from the experimentally accessible nonclassicality quasiprobabilities. Other quantum-state representations, such as sss-parametrized quasiprobabilities, insufficiently indicate or even fail to directly uncover detailed information on the properties of quantum states. As an example, our approach is applied to multi-photon-added squeezed vacuum states.