High-dimension experimental tomography of a path-encoded photon quantum-state (1906.04122v1)

Abstract: Quantum information protocols often rely on tomographic techniques to determine the state of the system. A popular method of encoding information is on the different paths a photon may take, for example, parallel waveguides in integrated optics. However, reconstruction of states encoded onto a large number of paths is often prohibitively resource intensive and requires complicated experimental setups. Addressing this, we present a simple method for determining the state of a photon in a superposition of d paths using a rotating one-dimensional optical Fourier Transform. We establish the theory and experimentally demonstrate the technique by measuring a wide variety of six-dimensional density matrices. The average fidelity of these with the expected state is as high as 0.9852 +/- 0.0008. This performance is comparable or exceeds established tomographic methods for other types of systems.