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Published April 20, 2015 | Published + Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

Scan-free direct measurement of an extremely high-dimensional photonic state

Abstract

Retrieving the vast amount of information carried by a photon is an enduring challenge in quantum metrology science and quantum photonics research. The transverse spatial state of a photon is a convenient high-dimensional quantum system for study, as it has a well-understood classical analog as the transverse complex field profile of an optical beam. One severe drawback of all currently available quantum metrology techniques is the need for a time-consuming characterization process, which scales very unfavorably with the dimensionality of the quantum system. Here we demonstrate a technique that directly measures a million-dimensional photonic spatial state with a single setting of the measurement apparatus. Through the arrangement of a weak measurement of momentum and parallel strong measurements of position, the complex values of the entire photon state vector become measurable directly. The dimension of our measured state is approximately four orders of magnitude larger than previously measured. Our work opens up a practical route for characterizing high-dimensional quantum systems in real time. Furthermore, our demonstration also serves as a high-speed, extremely high-resolution unambiguous complex field measurement technique for diverse classical applications.

Additional Information

© 2015 Optical Society of America. Received 4 November 2014; revised 19 March 2015; accepted 6 April 2015 (Doc. ID 226151); published 20 April 2015. The authors thank M. Lavery and J. Leach for helpful discussions. Mo. M., Me. M., and R. W. B. acknowledge support from the DARPA InPho Program. In addition, R. W. B. acknowledges support from the Canada Excellence Research Chairs program, and Me. M. acknowledges support from the European Commission through a Marie Curie fellowship. FUNDING INFORMATION: DARPA InPho Program; the Canada Excellence Research Chairs program; the European Commission through a Marie Curie fellowship.

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Published - optica-2-4-388.pdf

Supplemental Material - optica24388m001.PDF

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