Wigner function reconstruction by hybrid photodetectors in the linear regime
Maria Bondani, Alessia Allevi, Alessandra Andreoni · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2009
We present an experimental scheme for the reconstruction of the Wigner function of optical states. The method is based on direct intensity measurements by non-ideal photodetectors operated in the linear regime. We mix, at a beam-splitter, the signal state with a set of coherent probes of known complex amplitudes, and measure the probability distribution of the detected photons for each probe. The Wigner function is given by a suitable sum of those probability distributions. For comparison, the same data are analyzed to obtain the number distributions and the Wigner functions for photons.