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Bulletin of the American Physical Society

Electronic Noise in Optical homodyne Tomography

Dallas Hoffman, J. Appel, Eden V. Figueroa, Alex Lvovsky

Published Jun 8, 2007• 0 citations
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Abstract

The effect of the detector electronic noise in an optical homodyne tomography experiment is shown to be equivalent to an optical loss if the detector is calibrated by measuring the quadrature noise of the vacuum state. An explicit relation between the electronic noise level and the equivalent optical efficiency is obtained.

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We study the effects of phase-insensitive noise on homodyne measurements of a radiation density matrix. We prove that this noise has an effect equivalent to a non-unit quantum efficiency at detectors. The overall effective quantum efficiency η∗ of the measurement is evaluated in terms of the quantum efficiency at detectors and of the average number of noise photons added to the radiation field. For pure Gaussian-displacement noise, we show that half a photon of noise is enough to prevent the homodyne measurement of the density matrix.
We suggest and demonstrate a tomographic method to characterise homodyne detectors at the quantum level.The positive operator measure associated with the detector is expanded in a quadrature basis and probed with a set of coherent states.The coefficients of the expansion are then retrieved using a least squares algorithm.Our model is general enough to describe different implementations of the homodyne setup, and it has proven capable of effectively describing the detector response to different tomographic sets.We validate the reconstructed operator measure on nonclassical states and exploit results to estimate the overall quantum efficiency of the detector.
Squeezed states of the electromagnetic field have been generated by nondegenerate four-wave mixing due to Na atoms in an optical cavity. The optical noise in the cavity, comprised of primarily vacuum fluctuations and a small component of spontaneous emission from the pumped Na atoms, is amplified in one quadrature of the optical field and deamplified in the other quadrature. These quadrature components are measured with a balanced homodyne detector. The total noise level in the deamplified quadrature drops below the vacuum noise level.
Optical homodyne tomography consists in reconstructing the quantum state of an optical field from repeated measurements of its amplitude at different field phases (homodyne data). The experimental noise, which unavoidably affects the homodyne data, leads to a detection efficiency η<1\eta<1η<1 . The problem of reconstructing quantum states from noisy homodyne data sets prompted an intense scientific debate about the presence or absence of a lower homodyne efficiency bound ( η>0.5\eta> 0.5η>0.5 ) below which quantum features, like quantum interferences, cannot be retrieved. Here, by numerical experiments, we demonstrate that quantum interferences can be effectively reconstructed also for low homodyne detection efficiency. In particular, we address the challenging case of a Schrödinger cat state and test the minimax and adaptive Wigner function reconstruction technique by processing homodyne data distributed according to the chosen state but with an efficiency η<0.5\eta< 0.5η<0.5 . By numerically reproducing the Schrödinger’s cat interference pattern, we give evidence that quantum state reconstruction is actually possible in these conditions, and provide a guideline for handling optical tomography based on homodyne data collected by low efficiency detectors.