Quantum tomography enhanced through parametric amplification

TL;DR

This paper discusses a protocol using phase sensitive parametric amplification to improve quantum tomography of light states, potentially overcoming detection losses, and proposes a feasible experimental implementation with current optical technology.

Contribution

It analyzes a 1994 protocol for loss mitigation in quantum tomography and demonstrates its practical feasibility with a proposed experiment using modern optical components.

Findings

Protocol can enable high-fidelity reconstruction of nonclassical states.

Sufficient amplification can overcome detection inefficiencies.

Feasible proof-of-principle experiment with current technology.

Abstract

Quantum tomography is the standard method of reconstructing the Wigner function of quantum states of light by means of balanced homodyne detection. The reconstruction quality strongly depends on the photodetectors quantum efficiency and other losses in the measurement setup. In this article we analyse in detail a protocol of enhanced quantum tomography, proposed by Leonhardt and Paul in 1994, which allows one to reduce the degrading effect of detection losses. It is based on phase sensitive parametric amplification, with the phase of the amplified quadrature being scanned synchronously with the local oscil- lator phase. Although with sufficiently strong amplification the protocol enables overcoming any detection inefficiency, it was so far not implemented in experiment, probably due to the losses in the amplifier. Here we discuss a possible proof-of-principle experiment with a traveling-wave parametric amplifier. We show that with the state-of-the art optical elements, the protocol enables high-fidelity tomographic reconstruction of bright nonclassical states of light. We consider two examples: bright squeezed vacuum and squeezed single-photon state, with the latter being a non-Gaussian state and both strongly affected by the losses.