OAM tomography with Heisenberg-Weyl observables

Abstract: Photons carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM) are excellent qudits and are widely used in several applications, such as long distance quantum communication, $d$-dimensional teleportation and high-resolution imaging and metrology. All these protocols rely on quantum tomography to characterise the OAM state, which currently requires complex measurements involving spatial light modulators and mode filters. To simplify the measurement and characterisation of OAM states, here we apply a recent tomography protocol [Asadian et al., \pra {\bf 94}, 010301 (2016)]. Our scheme for OAM tomography in $d$ dimensions requires only a set of measurements on a mode qubit, i.e., a 2-dimensional system. This replaces the current complexity of OAM measurements by the ability to perform generalized Pauli operators $X_d, Z_d$ on OAM states. Our scheme can be adapted in principle to other degrees of freedom, thus opening the way for more complex qudit tomography.