Maximally polarized states for quantum light fields

Journal Article · Mon Oct 15 04:00:00 EDT 2007 · Physical Review. A

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PHYSREVA.76.043820· OSTI ID:21020815

Sanchez-Soto, Luis L; Yustas, Eulogio C ^[1]; Bjoerk, Gunnar ^[2]; Klimov, Andrei B ^[3]

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1. Departamento de Optica, Facultad de Fisica, Universidad Complutense, 28040 Madrid (Spain)
2. School of Information and Communication Technology, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Electrum 229, SE-164 40 Kista (Sweden)
3. Departamento de Fisica, Universidad de Guadalajara, 44420 Guadalajara, Jalisco (Mexico)

The degree of polarization of a quantum field can be defined as its distance to an appropriate set of states. When we take unpolarized states as this reference set, the states optimizing this degree for a fixed average number of photons N present a fairly symmetric, parabolic photon statistic, with a variance scaling as N{sup 2}. Although no standard optical process yields such a statistic, we show that, to an excellent approximation, a highly squeezed vacuum can be taken as maximally polarized. We also consider the distance of a field to the set of its SU(2) transformed, finding that certain linear superpositions of SU(2) coherent states make this degree to be unity.

• OSTI ID: 21020815
• Journal Information: Physical Review. A, Journal Name: Physical Review. A Journal Issue: 4 Vol. 76; ISSN 1050-2947; ISSN PLRAAN
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS
GENERAL PHYSICS
APPROXIMATIONS
DISTANCE
EIGENSTATES
OPTICS
OPTIMIZATION
PHOTONS
POLARIZATION
SCALING
SU-2 GROUPS