Accurate photonic temporal mode analysis with reduced resources

TL;DR

This paper enhances the method of analyzing quantum light's temporal modes by enabling accurate amplitude and phase extraction with fewer resources, validated through experimental demonstration.

Contribution

It introduces a refined approach for temporal mode analysis that reduces experimental resources needed for accurate quantum light characterization.

Findings

Effective extraction of amplitude and phase of temporal modes

Identification of parameter regimes for reliable reconstruction

Experimental validation of the improved method

Abstract

The knowledge and thus characterization of the temporal modes of quantum light fields is important in many areas of quantum physics ranging from experimental setup diagnosis to fundamental-physics investigations. Recent results showed how the auto-correlation function computed from continuous-wave homodyne measurements can be a powerful way to access the temporal mode structure. Here, we push forward this method by providing a deeper understanding and by showing how to extract the amplitude and phase of the temporal mode function with reduced experimental resources. Moreover, a quantitative analysis allows us to identify a regime of parameters where the method provides a trustworthy reconstruction, which we illustrate experimentally.