Phys. Rev. Lett. 87, 050402 (2001) [4 pages]Quantum State Reconstruction of the Single-Photon Fock State
See accompanying Physics Focus We have reconstructed the quantum state of optical pulses containing single photons using the method of phase-randomized pulsed optical homodyne tomography. The single-photon Fock state |1〉 was prepared using conditional measurements on photon pairs born in the process of parametric down-conversion. A probability distribution of the phase-averaged electric field amplitudes with a strongly non-Gaussian shape is obtained with the total detection efficiency of (55±1)%. The angle-averaged Wigner function reconstructed from this distribution shows a strong dip reaching classically impossible negative values around the origin of the phase space. © 2001 The American Physical Society URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.87.050402
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevLett.87.050402
PACS:
03.65.Wj, 42.50.Dv
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