Direct measurement of the Wigner function by photon counting

Banaszek, K.; Radzewicz, C.; Wodkiewicz, K.; Krasinski, J. S.

Direct measurement of the Wigner function by photon counting

Authors

Description

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.
4 pages, REVTeX