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Physical Review A

Statistics of difference events in homodyne detection

W. Vogel, Jens Grabow

Published May 1, 1993• 90 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The statistics of the difference events in a balanced homodyne-detection scheme is studied without using the standard assumption of a strong, classical local oscillator. Starting from the quantum theory of photon counting, we derive the probability distribution for the difference events in the two detection channels. In the limit of the local oscillator being strong compared with the signal, the difference-number statistics tends to the statistics of the electric-field strength of the signal field. For weak signals, this limit may be obtained already far from a classical behavior of the local oscillator. While changing the local oscillator intensity, a transition of the observable concerning the signal field occurs from the photon-number difference towards the electric-field strength. Such a measurement scheme renders it possible to observe the quantum features of a coherent state or a single-photon state from the point of view of the field-strength statistics, a picture which is closely related to classical optics. The possibility to get some insight in the statistical properties of the phase difference of two microscopic fields is discussed.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.47.4227

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The statistics of the difference events in a balanced homodyne-detection scheme is studied without using the standard assumption of a strong, classical local oscillator. Starting from the quantum theory of photon counting, we derive the probability distribution for the difference events in the two detection channels. In the limit of the local oscillator being strong compared with the signal, the difference-number statistics tends to the statistics of the electric-field strength of the signal field. For weak signals, this limit may be obtained already far from a classical behavior of the local oscillator. While changing the local oscillator intensity, a transition of the observable concerning the signal field occurs from the photon-number difference towards the electric-field strength. Such a measurement scheme renders it possible to observe the quantum features of a coherent state or a single-photon state from the point of view of the field-strength statistics, a picture which is closely related to classical optics. The possibility to get some insight in the statistical properties of the phase difference of two microscopic fields is discussed.
The technique of dc-balanced, pulsed homodyne detection for the purpose of determining optical-field statistics on short time scales is analyzed theoretically. Such measurements provide photon-number and phase distributions associated with a repetitive signal light field in a short time window. Time- and space-varying signal and local-oscillator pulses are treated, thus generalizing earlier treatments of photoelectron difference statistics in homodyne detection. Experimental issues, such as the effects of imperfect detector balancing on (time-integrated) dc detection and the consequences of background noise caused by non-mode-matched parts of the multimode signal field, are analyzed. The Wigner, or joint, distribution for the two field-quadrature amplitudes during the sampling time window can be directly determined by tomographic inversion of the measured photoelectron distributions. It is pointed out that homodyne detection provides a new method for the simultaneous measurement of temporal and spectral information. Although the theory is generally formulated, with both signal and local-oscillator fields being quantized, emphasis is placed on the limit of a strong, coherent local-oscillator field, making semiclassical interpretation possible.
Homodyne detection is the most effective detection scheme employed in quantum optics to characterize quantum states. It is based on mixing at a beam splitter the signal to be measured with a coherent state, called the “local oscillator,” and on evaluating the difference of the photocurrents of two photodiodes measuring the outputs of the beam splitter. If the local oscillator is much more intense than the field to be measured, the homodyne signal is proportional to the signal-field quadratures. If the local oscillator is less intense, the photodiodes can be replaced with photon-number-resolving detectors, which have a smaller dynamics but can measure the light statistics. The resulting new homodyne-like detector acquires a hybrid nature, being it capable of yielding information on both the particle-like (statistics) and wave-like (phase) properties of light signals. The scheme has been tested in the measurement of the quadratures of coherent states, bracket states and phase-averaged coherent states at different intensities of the local oscillator.
The balanced homodyne detector is the paradigm of phase-sensitive detection schemes in quantum optics. We study the effects of a quantum local oscillator in a coherent state for this detector when it is coupled to a single signal mode. We calculate explicit general expressions for the output statistics of the difference current of this detector (applicable even to non-classical states), and compare them to the statistics of the so-called quadrature-phase amplitude. We show that the naive condition that the number of quanta in the local oscillator be much larger than the number in the signal is not sufficient to ensure that the homodyne detector approximates an ideal detectorof the quadrature-phase amplitude, further, we derive explicit conditions for this approximation to be achieved when the signal is a coherent state or a superposition of coherent states.
It is usually assumed that a balanced homodyne detector measures a variable called the quadrature phase amplitude of a signal field. We examine this assumption by obtaining analytic expressions for the probability statistics for the output of such a detector for a single-mode signal with both signal and local oscillator treated quantum mechanically. We investigate the conditions under which the statistics of the quadrature phase are reproduced in the actual output of the detector. We show that the most obvious condition---that the number of quanta in the local oscillator be much larger than the number in the signal---is not sufficient to ensure that a balanced homodyne detector acts like an ideal detector of quadrature phases. Furthermore, we obtain the explicit conditions that are necessary and sufficient to reproduce the interference features in the homodyne statistics of a superposition of coherent states.
Based on proposals to measure squeezing by homodyne cross correlation [Ou, Hong, and Mandel, Phys. Rev. A 36, 192 (1987)] and by homodyne intensity correlation measurements with a weak local oscillator [Vogel, Phys. Rev. Lett. 67, 2450 (1991)], the method of homodyne correlation measurements is considered in detail for the case of weak local oscillators. Aside from the feasibility of measuring squeezing in low efficiency detection, it appears possible to record the correlation of the noise of two noncommuting observables, namely, the intensity and the electric field strength of the signal field. The separation of the different contributions to the measured correlations is considered and spectral correlation measurements are analyzed. Local oscillator noise, which is not balanced out in such a scheme, is found to be attenuated effectively by decreasing the local oscillator field. In particular, in the homodyne cross correlation scheme, it is of interest to use a beam splitter that significantly differs from a 50%:50% partition.