• DOI:10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.270504
• Corpus ID: 235368042

Enhanced Electro-optic Sampling with Quantum Probes

@article{Virally2021EnhancedES,
  title={Enhanced Electro-optic Sampling with Quantum Probes},
  author={St{\'e}phane Virally and Patrick Cusson and Denis V Seletskiy},
  journal={Physical Review Letters},
  year={2021}
}

• S. Virally, Patrick Cusson, D. Seletskiy
• Published 8 June 2021
• Physics
• Physical Review Letters

Employing electro-optic sampling (EOS) with ultrashort probe pulses, recent experiments showed direct measurements of quantum vacuum fields and their correlations on subcycle timescales. Here, we propose a quantum-enhanced EOS where photon-number entangled twin beams are used to derive conditioned non-classical probes. In the case of the quantum vacuum, this leads to a six-fold improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio over the classically-probed EOS. In addition, engineering of the conditioning protocol yields a reliable way to extract higher-order moments of the quantum noise distribution and robust discrimination of the input quantum states, for instance a vacuum and a few-photon cat state. These improvements open a viable route towards robust tomography of quantum fields in space-time, an equivalent of homodyne detection in energy-momentum space, and the possibility of precise experiments in real-space quantum electrodynamics.