(1) Laboratoire Charles Fabry, Institut d'Optique Théorique et Appliquée, 91403 Orsay, France, FR
Abstract:
Homodyne detection can be used to perform measurements on various quantum states of the light, such as conditional single photon states produced by parametric fluorescence processes. In the pulsed regime, the time and frequency overlap between the single photon wave packet and the local oscillator field plays a crucial role. We show in this paper that this overlap can be characterized by an effective quantum efficiency, which is explicitly calculated in various situations of experimental interest. Received 27 July 2000 and Received in final form 29 November 2000