Precise information about the temporal mode of optical states is crucial for optimizing their interaction efficiency between themselves and/or with matter in various quantum communication devices.Here we propose and e...Precise information about the temporal mode of optical states is crucial for optimizing their interaction efficiency between themselves and/or with matter in various quantum communication devices.Here we propose and experimentally demonstrate a method of determining both the real and imaginary components of a single photon’s temporal density matrix by measuring the autocorrelation function of the photocurrent from a balanced homodyne detector at multiple local oscillator frequencies.We test our method on single photons heralded from biphotons generated via four-wave mixing in an atomic vapor and obtain excellent agreement with theoretical predictions for several settings.展开更多
基金The project is supported by NSERC and CIFAR.AL is a CIFAR FellowZQ is supported by the China Scholarship Council
文摘Precise information about the temporal mode of optical states is crucial for optimizing their interaction efficiency between themselves and/or with matter in various quantum communication devices.Here we propose and experimentally demonstrate a method of determining both the real and imaginary components of a single photon’s temporal density matrix by measuring the autocorrelation function of the photocurrent from a balanced homodyne detector at multiple local oscillator frequencies.We test our method on single photons heralded from biphotons generated via four-wave mixing in an atomic vapor and obtain excellent agreement with theoretical predictions for several settings.