Enhanced Electro-Optic Sampling with Quantum Probes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a quantum-enhanced electro-optic sampling technique using entangled photon probes, significantly improving measurement sensitivity and enabling detailed quantum state analysis of vacuum and other quantum fields.

Contribution

It presents a novel quantum-enhanced EOS method employing entangled twin beams, achieving higher accuracy and enabling extraction of higher-order quantum noise moments.

Findings

Six-fold improvement in signal-to-noise ratio for vacuum measurements

Reliable discrimination of quantum states including vacuum and cat states

Enhanced capability for quantum field tomography

Abstract

Employing electro-optic sampling (EOS) with ultrashort probe pulses, recent experiments showed direct measurements of quantum vacuum fields and their correlations on subcycle timescales. Here, we propose a quantum-enhanced EOS where photon-number entangled twin beams are used to derive conditioned non-classical probes. In the case of the quantum vacuum, this leads to a six-fold improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio over the classically-probed EOS. In addition, engineering of the conditioning protocol yields a reliable way to extract higher-order moments of the quantum noise distribution and robust discrimination of the input quantum states, for instance a vacuum and a few-photon cat state. These improvements open a viable route towards robust tomography of quantum fields in space-time, an equivalent of homodyne detection in energy-momentum space, and the possibility of precise experiments in real-space quantum electrodynamics.