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Phys. Rev. Lett. 87, 050402 (2001) [4 pages]

Quantum State Reconstruction of the Single-Photon Fock State

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A. I. Lvovsky*, H. Hansen, T. Aichele, O. Benson, J. Mlynek, and S. Schiller
Fachbereich Physik, Universität Konstanz, D-78457 Konstanz, Germany

Received 14 March 2001; published 11 July 2001

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

*Email address: Alex.Lvovsky@uni-konstanz.de

Present address: President, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, D-10099 Berlin, Germany.

Present address: Institut für Experimentalphysik, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, D-40225 Düsseldorf, Germany.