Maximally polarized states for quantum light fields

Abstract

The degree of polarization of a quantum state can be defined as its Hilbert-Schmidt distance to the set of unpolarized states. We demonstrate that the states optimizing this degree for a fixed average number of photons $\bar{N}$ present a fairly symmetric, parabolic photon statistics, with a variance scaling as ${\bar{N}}^2$. Although no standard optical process yields such a statistics, we show that, to an excellent approximation, a highly squeezed vacuum can be considered as maximally polarized.

4 pages, 3 eps-color figures

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Cited by in corpus (7)

• Uhlmann fidelity between two-mode Gaussian states
• Measures of non-Gaussianity for one-mode field states
• Quantum Chernoff bound as a measure of nonclassicality for one-mode Gaussian states
• Three-dimensional Quantum Polarization Tomography of Macroscopic Bell States
• Quantum Polarimetry
• Evidence-based certification of quantum dimensions
• Majorization of quantum polarization distributions