Quantum tomography of the single-photon Fock state

Summary form only given. The single photon Fock state is one of the most fundamental states of the light field. It is highly non-classical and reveals the wave-particle duality of light most strikingly. Its marginal distributions are of non-Gaussian shape and its Wigner function exhibits a strong negativity around the origin of phase space. Although the reconstruction of the Fock state has already been performed for the motional state of trapped beryllium ions, in the optical domain this task has not been resolved so far, the main difficulty being the lack of coherent single-photon sources. We present results of applying the technique of optical homodyne tomography to the single photon Fock state prepared by conditional measurements on a photon pair produced in parametric down conversion.