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Optics Letters

Experimental determination of number–phase uncertainty relations

M. Beck, D. T. Smithey, J. Cooper, Michael G. Raymer

Published Aug 1, 1993• 62 citations
Publisher

Abstract

An experimental determination of the uncertainty product for the phase and photon number of a mode of the electromagnetic field is performed. The expectation value of the commutator that sets the lower bound for the uncertainty product is also determined experimentally. This is accomplished by using optical homodyne tomography to measure the density matrix of a small-photon-number coherent state. The experimental results agree with the quantum-mechanical predictions.

DOI
10.1364/ol.18.001259

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An experimental determination of the uncertainty product for the phase and photon number of a mode of the electromagnetic field is performed. The expectation value of the commutator that sets the lower bound for the uncertainty product is also determined experimentally. This is accomplished by using optical homodyne tomography to measure the density matrix of a small-photon-number coherent state. The experimental results agree with the quantum-mechanical predictions.
We have experimentally determined all of the quantities involved in the uncertainty relation for the phase and photon number of a mode of the electromagnetic field when the field mode is in a coherent state of small average photon number. This is accomplished by determining the quantum state of the field using optical homodyne tomography, which uses measured distributions of electric-field quadrature amplitude to determine the Wigner function and hence the density matrix. The measured state is then used to calculate the uncertainty product for the number and phase, as well as the expectation value of the commutator of the number and phase operators. The experimental results agree with the quantum-mechanical predictions. We also present measured phase- and photon-number distributions for these weak coherent states, as well as their measured complex wave functions.
The uncertainty principle applied to electromagnetic fields implies that the field phase and photon number cannot simultaneously have arbitrarily narrow distributions. Here we describe an experiment which determines, for the first time, the variances of phase and photon number for a field containing small numbers of photons. The measurements allow a test of the uncertainty relation for the phase and photon number of a mode of the electromagnetic field when the field mode is in a very weak coherent state. The phase of the field is described by the Pegg-Barnett phase operator formalism. [1] The measurements are accomplished by experimentally determining the quantum state of the field by using optical homodyne tomography. [2] This method of state characterization requires that an ensemble of many measurements be performed. [3] In this case, the relevant interpretation of the uncertainty relation is that the state of the field does not have well defined phase and photon number.
Experiments have been performed to determine the Wigner distribution and the density matrix (and for pure states the wave function) of a light mode, by using tomographic inversion of a set of measured probability distributions for quadrature amplitudes.From these measurements the quantum distributions of optical phase and photon number have been obtained.The measurements of quadrature-amplitude distributions for a temporal mode of the electromagnetic field are carried out using balanced homodyne detection.We refer to this new method as optical homodyne tomography.Given the measured density matrix, one can experimentally infer any of the various quantum distributions of optical phase, in particular the Pegg-Barnett (or, equivalently, Shapiro-Shepard) phase distribution, the marginal Wigner distribution, and the Vogel-Schleich operational phase distribntion.We have used this approach to make measurements of the number-plase uncertainty relation for coherent-state fields.The coherent states do not attain the minimum value for the number-phase uncertainty product, as set by the expectation value of the commutator of the number and phase operators; this is true theoretically and experimentally.
From the experimental measurement of probability distributions of quadrature-field amplitudes, followed by numerical inversion (optical homodyne tomography), we have determined distributions and/or moments of the optical phase of small-photon-number fields for several definitions of the phase variable, including those based on Hermitian operators and on quasiprobability distributions. These measurements were performed on a vacuum field, and a weakly squeezed field. It is found that each definition of phase yields different distributions and/or moments for the experimental data. In addition, all of the experimentally determined quantities agree with the corresponding theoretical predictions.