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Physical Review Letters

Giant Violations of Classical Inequalities through Conditional Homodyne Detection of the Quadrature Amplitudes of Light

H. J. Carmichael, H. M. Castro-Beltrán, G. T. Foster, Luis A. Orozco

Published Aug 28, 2000• 88 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Conditional homodyne detection is proposed as an extension of the intensity correlation technique introduced by Hanbury-Brown and Twiss [Nature (London) 177, 27 (1956)]. It detects giant quadrature amplitude fluctuations for weakly squeezed light, violating a classical bound by orders of magnitude. Fluctuations of both quadrature amplitudes are anomalously large. The squeezed quadrature also exhibits an anomalous phase.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.85.1855

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Conditional homodyne detection is proposed as an extension of the intensity correlation technique introduced by Hanbury-Brown and Twiss [Nature (London) 177, 27 (1956)]. It detects giant quadrature amplitude fluctuations for weakly squeezed light, violating a classical bound by orders of magnitude. Fluctuations of both quadrature amplitudes are anomalously large. The squeezed quadrature also exhibits an anomalous phase.
Summary form only given. The squeezing of an optical field is normally observed in the frequency domain using balanced homodyne detection to measure the fluctuation variance of a selected quadrature amplitude. The scheme amounts to a measurement of sub-Poissonian photon statistics and is sensitive to efficiencies as any such unconditional measurement is. Conditional measurements are independent of efficiencies. We propose a conditional homodyne detection scheme for observing the amplitude fluctuations of squeezed light. The central idea is to sample the photocurrent by triggering on a photon count and hence realize an efficiency independent measurement that resolves the quantum fluctuations in time. Our scheme directly measures the correlation function.
Three different noise moments of field strength, intensity, and their correlations are simultaneously measured. For this purpose a homodyne cross-correlation measurement [1] is implemented by superimposing the signal field and a weak local oscillator on an unbalanced beam splitter. The relevant information is obtained via the intensity noise correlation of the output modes. Detection details like quantum efficiencies or uncorrelated dark noise are meaningless for our technique. Yet unknown insight in the quantumness of a squeezed signal field is retrieved from the anomalous moment, correlating field strength with intensity noise. A classical inequality including this moment is violated for almost all signal phases. Precognition on quantum theory is superfluous, as our analysis is solely based on classical physics.
Conditional homodyne detection (CHD) allows a fresh view of the nonclassicality of optical fields. A balanced homodyne detector replaces a photodetector in the Hanbury-Brown-Twiss setup of photon correlations, thus measuring a quadrature (amplitude) of the field on the cue of a photon detection. In CHD, both quadratures of a quantum field violate classical inequalities even if photon correlations look classical. We calculate the amplitude-intensity correlations for the resonance fluorescence of a two-level atom and a three-level atom in the V configuration, notable producers of quantum effects (antibunching, squeezing, and sub-Poissonian statistics). In the V atom, where we consider that the ground state is coupled strongly (weakly) to a short (long) lived state, the strong transition resembles the two-level atom features, albeit with larger oscillations and a slower decay. However, the autocorrelation of the fluorescence of the weak transition is clearly asymmetric around a zero delay, indicating the breakdown of detailed balance, and violating the inequalities by orders of magnitude due to the low photon flux. Cross correlations of strong and weak channels also display antibunching and the loss of bounds.