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Manipulating thermal light states by the controlled addition and subtraction of single photons

Valentina Parigi, Zavatta A., Bellini M.

Published Jan 1, 2008• 0 citations
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Abstract

We report the generation and the tomographic analysis of novel quantum states of light generated by the controlled addition and subtraction of single photons to and from a classical and fully incoherent thermal light field. Time-domain quantum tomography is used to thoroughly investigate the character of the resulting states. Several different criteria are employed to test and quantify nonclassicality of photon-added thermal states, while the peculiar features concerning the mean photon number of photon-subtracted thermal states are clearly observed.

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Manipulating thermal light states by the controlled addition and subtraction of single photons

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We report the generation and the tomographic analysis of novel quantum states of light generated by the controlled addition and subtraction of single photons to and from a classical and fully incoherent thermal light field. Time-domain quantum tomography is used to thoroughly investigate the character of the resulting states. Several different criteria are employed to test and quantify nonclassicality of photon-added thermal states, while the peculiar features concerning the mean photon number of photon-subtracted thermal states are clearly observed.
We report the generation and the tomographic analysis of novel quantum states of light generated by the controlled addition and subtraction of single photons to and from a classical and fully incoherent thermal light field. Time-domain quantum tomography is used to thoroughly investigate the character of the resulting states. Several different criteria are employed to test and quantify nonclassicality of photon-added thermal states, while the peculiar features concerning the mean photon number of photon-subtracted thermal states are clearly observed.
We report the experimental realization and tomographic analysis of quantum light states obtained by exciting a classical thermal field by a single photon. Such states, although completely incoherent, possess a tunable degree of quantumness which is here exploited to put to a stringent experimental test some of the criteria proposed for the proof and the measurement of state nonclassicality. The quantum character of the states is also given in quantum information terms by evaluating the amount of entanglement that they can produce.
We show the experimental observation of quantum states of light exhibiting nonclassical features obtained by single photon excitation of a thermal state. Such single-photon-added thermal states are the result of the single action of the creation operator on a mixed state that can be fully described classically. They show different degree of nonclassicality depending on the mean photon number of the original thermal state. The generated state is characterized by means of ultra-fast homodyne detection which allows us to reconstruct its density matrix and Wigner function by quantum tomography. We demonstrate the nonclassical behavior of single-photon added thermal states by an analysis of the negativity of the Wigner function.
The possibility of arbitrarily "adding" and "subtracting" single photons to and from a light field may give access to a complete engineering of quantum states and to fundamental quantum phenomena. We experimentally implemented simple alternated sequences of photon creation and annihilation on a thermal field and used quantum tomography to verify the peculiar character of the resulting light states. In particular, as the final states depend on the order in which the two actions are performed, we directly observed the noncommutativity of the creation and annihilation operators, one of the cardinal concepts of quantum mechanics, at the basis of the quantum behavior of light. These results represent a step toward the full quantum control of a field and may provide new resources for quantum information protocols.
Thermal radiation played a pivotal role in the preliminary development of quantum physics where it helped resolve the apparent incongruity of the ultraviolet catastrophe. In contemporary physics, thermal state generation and manipulation finds new application in fields such as quantum imaging and quantum illumination and as a practical realization of Maxwell's demon. These applications often go hand in hand with photon subtraction operations which probabilistically amplify the mean photon number (MPN) of thermal light as a result of its super-Poissonian photon statistics. In this article, we introduce an operation for thermal states of light based on a generalized photon subtraction scheme. Displaced-photon subtraction (DPS) makes use of coherent state displacement followed by a subsequent anti-displacement in combination with single-photon detection to probe the MPN of a thermal state. We find regimes in which the output of a successful DPS is amplified, unchanged, or attenuated relative to the unconditioned output state. The regime of operation is controlled via the magnitude of the coherent displacement. A theoretical description of generalized photon subtraction of a displaced thermal state is derived via a two-mode moment-generating function (MGF) and used to describe generalized DPS. We perform a proof of principle experimental implementation of DPS for the case of a balanced beam splitter for which results demonstrate good agreement with the model.