Complete temporal characterization of a single photon

Abstract

Precise information about the temporal mode of optical states is crucial for optimizing their interaction efficiency between themselves and/or with matter in various quantum communication devices. Here we propose and experimentally demonstrate a method of determining both the real and imaginary components of a single photon's temporal density matrix by measuring the autocorrelation function of the photocurrent from a balanced homodyne detector at multiple local oscillator frequencies. We test our method on single photons heralded from biphotons generated via four-wave mixing in an atomic vapor and obtain excellent agreement with theoretical predictions for several settings.