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

References in corpus (2)

• Purity of Gaussian states: measurement schemes and time-evolution in noisy channels
• Distance-based degrees of polarization for a quantum field