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Updated: Aug 17, 2026

Quantum State Engineering of Light with Continuous-wave Optical Parametric Oscillators
Published on: May 30, 2014
Quantum state reconstruction of the single-photon Fock state
A I Lvovsky1, H Hansen, T Aichele
1Fachbereich Physik, Universität Konstanz, D-78457 Konstanz, Germany. Alex.Lvovsky@uni-konstanz.de
Abstract:
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.
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