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Physical Review A

Optical homodyne tomography of unpolarized light

D. S. Krähmer, Ulf Leonhardt

Published Apr 1, 1997• 10 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We show how to reconstruct the quantum state of completely unpolarized light of type I [J. Lehner, U. Leonhardt, and H. Paul, Phys. Rev. A 53, 2727 (1996)] via optical homodyne tomography. Our analysis can be extended to any two-mode situation with complete two-mode randomization and, moreover, to any two-dimensional harmonic oscillator with SU(2) symmetric states. Interestingly, we have shown that the Laplace operator applied to the quadrature distribution of unpolarized photons is orthogonal on the set of these distributions.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.55.3275

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We show how to reconstruct the quantum state of completely unpolarized light of type I [J. Lehner, U. Leonhardt, and H. Paul, Phys. Rev. A 53, 2727 (1996)] via optical homodyne tomography. Our analysis can be extended to any two-mode situation with complete two-mode randomization and, moreover, to any two-dimensional harmonic oscillator with SU(2) symmetric states. Interestingly, we have shown that the Laplace operator applied to the quadrature distribution of unpolarized photons is orthogonal on the set of these distributions.
Quantum-state tomography is proposed as a means to achieve a complete measurement of the quantum polarization state of a light wave. A set of measurements using dual-polarization balanced homodyne detection is shown to be tomographi-cally complete with respect to the statistics of the SU(2) Stokes operators on the Poincaré sphere. Complete reconstruction of the polarization sector of the density matrix of a partially polarized optical field can be achieved while randomizing the overall phase of the dual-polarization local oscillator.