Operational definition of quantum correlations of light Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • 2016 American Physical Society. Quantum features of correlated optical modes define a major aspect of the nonclassicality in quantized radiation fields. However, the phase-sensitive detection of a two-mode light field is restricted to interferometric setups and local intensity measurements. Even the full reconstruction of the quantum state of a single radiation mode relies on such detection layouts and the preparation of a well-defined reference light field. In this work, we establish the notion of the essential quantum correlations of two-mode light fields. It refers to those quantum correlations which are measurable by a given device, i.e., the accessible part of a nonclassical Glauber-Sudarshan phase-space distribution, which does not depend on a global phase. Assuming a simple four-port interferometer and photon-number-resolving detectors, we derive the reconstruction method and nonclassicality criteria based on the Laplace-transformed moment-generating function of the essential quasiprobability. With this technique, we demonstrate that the essential quantum correlations of a polarization tomography scheme are observable even if the detectors are imperfect and cannot truly resolve the photon statistics.

published proceedings

  • Physical Review A

altmetric score

  • 0.5

author list (cited authors)

  • Sperling, J., Vogel, W., & Agarwal, G. S.

citation count

  • 7

complete list of authors

  • Sperling, J||Vogel, W||Agarwal, GS

publication date

  • July 2016