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Phys. Rev. A 54, R3738 - R3741 (1996)

Conditional probabilities for a single photon at a beam splitter

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K. Jacobs and P. L. Knight
Optics Section, The Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College, London SW7 2BZ, England

Rapid Communication Received 16 May 1996; revised 25 July 1996

Eight-port homodyne detection may be used to perform a joint measurement on a single-mode input to a beam splitter; the x quadrature is measured at one output port, and the p quadrature is measured at the other. This is possible even when the input mode contains only one photon. We show to what extent this "joint measurement of a single photon" may be reconciled with the semiclassical notion that the photon may only exit from one of the beam splitter output ports.


©1996 The American Physical Society

URL: http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevA.54.R3738
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.54.R3738
PACS: 42.50.Dv, 03.65.Bz

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