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Modern Physics Letters B

ON THE MEASUREMENT OF THE PHASE DISTRIBUTION OF FIELD STATES

Clodoaldo Valverde, B. Baseia, J. M. C. Malbouisson

Published Aug 20, 2002• 5 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A proposal for measuring the phase distribution P(θ) of certain families of field states is presented. This method is based on establishing the connection between the phase distribution and the visibility of the (single-photon) interference in a Mach–Zehnder device. Such a scheme can also be applied to determine relative phases of superposed states.

DOI
10.1142/s0217984902004172

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One of the most delicate problems in quantum optics is the proper description of the phase of a single-mode radiation field. One has first to devise an experimental scheme for phase measurement, thus giving an operational definition of phase, and afterwards search for the proper quantum-mechanical description of the experimental procedure. Several such schemes which differ distinctly in their experimental setup have already been proposed and even partly realized. In this paper, I will describe them in some detail and present the outlines of their theoretical analysis.>

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A proposal for measuring the phase distribution P(θ) of certain families of field states is presented. This method is based on establishing the connection between the phase distribution and the visibility of the (single-photon) interference in a Mach–Zehnder device. Such a scheme can also be applied to determine relative phases of superposed states.
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Quantum key distribution (QKD) provides a solution for communication of unconditional security. However, the quantum channel disturbance in the field severely increases the quantum bit-error rate, degrading the performance of a QKD system. Here we present a setup comprising silica planar light wave circuits (PLCs), which is robust against the channel polarization disturbance. Our PLCs are based on the asymmetric Mach–Zehnder interferometer (AMZI), integrated with a tunable power splitter and thermo-optic phase modulators. The polarization characteristics of the AMZI PLC are investigated by a novel pulse self-interfering method to determine the operation temperature of implementing polarization insensitivity. Over a 20 km fiber channel with 30 Hz polarization scrambling, our time-bin phase-encoding QKD setup is characterized with an interference fringe visibility of 98.72%. The extinction ratio for the phase states is kept between 18 and 21 dB for 6 h without active phase correction.
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One of the most delicate problems in quantum optics is the proper description of the phase of a single-mode radiation field. One has first to devise an experimental scheme for phase measurement, thus giving an operational definition of phase, and afterwards search for the proper quantum-mechanical description of the experimental procedure. Several such schemes which differ distinctly in their experimental setup have already been proposed and even partly realized. In this paper, I will describe them in some detail and present the outlines of their theoretical analysis.>