Quantum polarization characterization and tomography

Abstract

We present a complete polarization characterization of any quantum state of two orthogonal polarization modes, and give a systematic measurement procedure to collect the necessary data. Full characterization requires measurements of the photon number in both modes and linear optics. In the situation where only the photon-number difference can be determined, a limited but useful characterization is obtained. The characteristic Stokes moment profiles are given for several common quantum states.

18 pages, 1 eps-color figures. To be published in New Journal of Physics (Focus Issue on Quantum Tomography)

References in corpus (3)

• Quantum degrees of polarization
• Statistical estimation of the quality of quantum-tomography protocols
• Quantum reconstruction of an intense polarization squeezed optical state

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Optimal Frames for Polarisation State Reconstruction
• Quasiprobability representation of quantum coherence
• Quasiprobability distributions for quantum-optical coherence and beyond
• Direct tomography of high-dimensional density matrices for general quantum states of photons
• Quantification and observation of genuine three-party coherence: A solution based on classical optics
• Nonlocality enhanced precision in quantum polarimetry via entangled photons
• Operational definition of quantum correlations of light
• Experimental characterization of quantum polarization of three-photon states
• Estimation of covariance matrix of macroscopic quantum states
• Direct Measurement of Higher-Order Nonlinear Polarization Squeezing