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Mode reconstruction of a light field by multi-photon statistics
Published
Author(s)
Elizabeth A. Goldschmidt, Fabrizio Piacentini, I. Ruo Berchera, Sergey V. Polyakov, Silke Peters, Stefan Kuck, Giorgio Brida, Ivo P. Degiovanni, Alan L. Migdall, Marco Genovese
Abstract
Knowing the underlying number and structure of occupied modes of a light field plays a crucial role in minimizing loss and decoherence of quantum information. Typically, full characterization of the mode structure involves a series of several separate measurements in spatial, temporal, frequency and polarization domains. Here we present a simple method to reconstruct the mode distribution of multi-mode classical and non-classical optical fields using a single measurement of higher-order photon number correlation functions. We experimentally demonstrate reconstruction of up to three modes with excellent agreement and study the robustness of our method in experimentally realizable regimes.
Goldschmidt, E.
, Piacentini, F.
, Ruo, I.
, Polyakov, S.
, Peters, S.
, Kuck, S.
, Brida, G.
, Degiovanni, I.
, Migdall, A.
and Genovese, M.
(2013),
Mode reconstruction of a light field by multi-photon statistics, Physical Review Letters, [online], https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.88.013822
(Accessed October 8, 2025)