Direct measurement of the Wigner function by photon counting
- 1 July 1999
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Physical Society (APS) in Physical Review A
- Vol. 60 (1) , 674-677
- https://doi.org/10.1103/physreva.60.674
Abstract
We report a direct measurement of the Wigner function characterizing the quantum state of a light mode. The experimental scheme is based on the representation of the Wigner function as an expectation value of a displaced photon number parity operator. This allowed us to scan the phase space point-by-point, and obtain the complete Wigner function without using any numerical reconstruction algorithms.Keywords
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