Abstract
We introduce a new approach to photodetection, based on absorbers (atoms, molecules, or dopant donors in semiconductors) that are kept in a steady superposition of two bound states having different spatial symmetries (e.g., s and p0). We consider the illumination of such absorbers by a superposition of two fields that are mutually orthogonal by virtue of polarization or frequency, and measurements of the resulting photocurrent along the direction of polarization of one of the fields. In contrast to conventional photon counters, the directional photocurrent generated in the considered scheme measures only the phase-sensitive cross products of the mutually orthogonal field amplitudes, without responding to the photon flux of each mode separately. If the light is a superposition of a one- or two-mode squeezed vacuum field and a nearly coherent (local-oscillator) field orthogonal to the former, then cross correlations between two such photocurrents yield the autocorrelation function of the squeezed-field quadrature without terms related to the noise of the local oscillator (although shot noise still affects the degree of accuracy to which the autocorrelation is measured).
© 1991 Optical Society of America
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