Hannover 2010 – scientific programme
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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik
Q 30: Quantum Effects: QED II / Interference and Correlations III
Q 30.6: Talk
Wednesday, March 10, 2010, 15:15–15:30, A 320
Measurement of Arbitrary-Order Coherences in a Single Light Beam with two Polarizations — •Uwe Schilling1, Joachim von Zanthier1, and Girish S. Agarwal2 — 1Institut für Optik, Information und Photonik, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany — 2Department of Physics, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, Oklahoma 74078-3072, USA
We present a scheme which allows to measure N-th order coherences of two orthogonally polarized light fields in a single spatial mode at very limited experimental costs. We show that to implement such a measurement, it is sufficient to determine N-th order intensity moments after the light beam has passed through two quarter-wave plates, one half-wave plate, and a polarizing beam splitter for specific settings of the wave plates. This method can be applied for arbitrarily large N and we give a set of explicit values for the settings of the wave plates, constituting an optimal measurement of the N-th order coherences for any N. While the most interesting application may be a full state tomography of Fock states, one can utilize our method for arbitrary (classical and nonclassical) states; in fact the general concepts are not even limited to polarization optics.