We report an ordinary homodyne method for detection of amplitude-squared squeezing in any state by measuring the higher-order moments of the number operator in light obtained by homodyning with intense coherent light.
Practically applicable criteria for the nonclassicality of quantum states are formulated in terms of different types of moments. For this purpose the moments of the creation and annihilation operators, of two quadratures, and of a quadrature and the photon number operator turn out to be useful. It is shown that all the required moments can be determined by homodyne correlation measurements. An example of a nonclassical effect that is easily characterized by our methods is amplitude-squared squeezing.
Information carried by an optical beam of light can usually be conveyed in the form of a temporal modulation of the intensity, phase, frequency or the polarization of the constituent mode(s). In that regard, homodyne detection is one of the most popular and standard method to measure the quantum mechanical properties of light Yuen & Shapiro (1978); Yuen et al. (1979); Yuen & Shapiro (1980); Yurke (1985). The quantum theory of homodyne detection originated principally from the works of Yuen and Shapiro et al. Yuen & Shapiro (1978); Yuen et al. (1979). In this method, a weak signal field is combined with a strong local oscillator field at a beam splitter, and the resulting signal is measured as a photocurrent. With the homodyne detection method, the quantum state of the signal field, such as the quadrature amplitude of the squeezed state, is easily measured Slusher et al. (1985); Wu et al. (1986 ); Polzik et al. (1992), and the quasiprobability distribution function can be measured by using the so-called optical homodyne tomography Smithey et al. (1993); Banaszek & W’odkiewicz (1996); Wallentowitz & Vogel (1996); Youn et al. (2001). Furthermore, optical homodyne detection is used to eavesdrop on the quantum key in quantum cryptography Hirano et al. (2000).
We study amplitude-squared squeezing in interaction of coherent light with a nonlinear Kerr medium modelled as an anharmonic oscillator with interaction Hamiltonian H = ½ λ a +2 a 2, where λ is proportional to χ(3) of the nonlinear medium and a is annihilation operator for the interacting field. We find the squeezing parameter S ( τ, r ) in terms of a dimensionless interaction time τ = λ t and Kerr parameter r , which is product of, τ and the average number of photons and obtain almost complete amplitude-squared squeezing (i.e., S ≈ 0) for very small interaction time and very large intensity of the interacting light. We optimize squeezing parameter S ( τ, r ) by an analytic estimation assuming high intensity of the interacting light and realistic values of Kerr nonlinearity following J.Bajer et al. [Czech. J. Phy. 52, 1313 (2002)] and obtain a scaling law for optimal amplitude-squared squeezing with minimum value S min , at r = r min for a given τ. The validity of the scaling law is checked numerically and analytically in the region of realistic values of Kerr nonlinearity and intensity of the interacting light.