The recent development of experimental techniques to implement the creation and the annihilation operators in the optical domain has found great interest for quantum information manipulation and processing. Quantum states of light obtained by the application of alternated sequences of the creation and annihilation operators
a^† and
a^ to a thermal state of light depend on the order in which the two operations are performed. The non-commutativity of the bosonic operators,
a^a^†=a^†a^=1, has been experimentally verified in terms of density matrixes and Wigner functions, which are reconstructed by quantum homodyne tomography. Recently, a setup has been proposed to directly and completely prove the bosonic commutation relation where a single-photon interferometer is used to create coherent superpositions of two alternated sequences of operators, such as
[a^a^†±a^†a^]. Some of the latest experimental results are discussed.
We present the experimental realization of a scheme, based on single-photon interference, for implementing superpositions of distinct quantum operations. Its application to a thermal light field (a well-categorized classical entity) illustrates quantum superposition from a new standpoint and provides a direct and quantitative verification of the bosonic commutation relation between creation and annihilation operators. By shifting the focus towards operator superpositions, this result opens interesting alternative perspectives for manipulating quantum states.
The canonical commutation relation is a cornerstone of quantum theory and underlies the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Although uncertainty relations have been extensively tested, direct verifications of the underlying commutation relation itself have remained elusive. We report an experimental demonstration of the bosonic commutation relation for optical field operators based on measurements of two distinct intensity correlation functions. From these measurements, we extract the expectation value of the field-operator commutator for both a single-photon state and coherent state. In both cases, the measured values are consistent with unity, in quantitative agreement with quantum theory.