Quantum phase-space description of light polarization

Abstract

We present a method to characterize the polarization state of a light field in the continuous-variable regime. Instead of using the abstract formalism of SU(2) quasidistributions, we model polarization in the classical spirit by superposing two harmonic oscillators of the same angular frequency along two orthogonal axes. By describing each oscillator by a $s$-parametrized quasidistribution, we derive in a consistent way the final function for the polarization. We compare with previous approaches and discuss how this formalism works in some relevant examples.

17 pages, 4 eps color figures

References in corpus (9)

• Quantum state reconstruction of the single-photon Fock state
• ``Plug and play'' systems for quantum cryptography
• Polarization squeezing and continuous-variable polarization entanglement
• Phase-space formulation of quantum mechanics and quantum state reconstruction for physical systems with Lie-group symmetries
• Experimental Detection of Entanglement with Polarized Photons
• Polarization Squeezing of Continuous Variable Stokes Parameters
• Wigner functions, squeezing properties and slow decoherence of atomic Schrodinger cats
• Simultaneous minimum-uncertainty measurement of discrete-valued complementary observables
• Jordan-Schwinger map, 3D harmonic oscillator constants of motion, and classical and quantum parameters characterizing electromagnetic wave polarization

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• Estimation of covariance matrix of macroscopic quantum states
• Higher-order optical-polarization
• Quasi-Probability Distribution Functions for Optical-Polarization