Giant violations of classical inequalities by the quantum fluctuations of squeezed light
H. J. Carmichael, H. M. Castro-Beltrán, G. T. Foster, Luis A. Orozco · Quantum Electronics and Laser Science Conference · 2000
Summary form only given. The squeezing of an optical field is normally observed in the frequency domain using balanced homodyne detection to measure the fluctuation variance of a selected quadrature amplitude. The scheme amounts to a measurement of sub-Poissonian photon statistics and is sensitive to efficiencies as any such unconditional measurement is. Conditional measurements are independent of efficiencies. We propose a conditional homodyne detection scheme for observing the amplitude fluctuations of squeezed light. The central idea is to sample the photocurrent by triggering on a photon count and hence realize an efficiency independent measurement that resolves the quantum fluctuations in time. Our scheme directly measures the correlation function.