Experimental polarization state tomography using optimal polarimeters

Abstract

We report on the experimental implementation of a polarimeter based on a scheme known to be optimal for obtaining the polarization vector of ensembles of spin-1 2 quantum systems, and the alignment procedure for this polarimeter. We also show how to use this polarimeter to estimate the polarization state for identically prepared ensembles of single photons and photon pairs and extend the method to obtain the density matrix for generic multi-photon states. State reconstruction and performance of the polarimeter is illustrated by actual measurements on identically prepared ensembles of single photons and polarization entangled photon pairs.

Single plane minimal tomography of double slit qubits

“…Numerous studies deal with the implementation of tomographic schemes in experiments involving photon polarization, including several schemes realizing this tetrahedron measurement [42,43,44]. In contrast, fewer papers have been devoted to the tomographic reconstruction of double slit qubits.…”

Optimal unbiased state characterization

“…These are usually very resource demanding tasks, since numerous copies of the original state are required in order to accumulate reliable statistics about measured probabilities [8,9,10]. Different strategies for QT have been theoretically proposed and experimentally implemented [11,12,13,14,15,16]. Nevertheless, even after a large set of measurements the experimental results still should be "cleaned" by applying sophisticated mathematical methods [17,18,19] in order to insure the best estimation of the reconstructed state.…”

Experimental scheme for qubit and qutrit symmetric informationally complete positive operator-valued measurements using multiport devices

“…There were also experiments characterized * Electronic address: gtabia@perimeterinstitute.ca as entanglement-assisted SIC-POVMs, where the photonic [10] and NMR [11] qubits were coupled to ancillary systems, allowed to interact, and then measured jointly. These experiments failed to measure the SIC-POVM operators directly and therefore, in a strict sense, are not true SIC-POVMs.…”