SINGLE-PHOTON DETECTION AND RECONSTRUCTION (TOMOGRAPHY) OF OPTICAL-FIELD STATES

The possibility of implementing a given photonic projective measurement with linear optics and photon detectors is discussed. This problem can be viewed as a single-shot discrimination of orthogonal pure quantum states. It is particularly shown that any two orthogonal states can be perfectly discriminated using only linear optics, photon counting, coherent ancillary states, and feedforward. This means that one can construct any binary projective measurement with these means, but without any nonclassical ancillary state . The state- ment holds in the asymptotic limit of a large number of these physical resources. To extend this result, we also address the problem of discriminating a simple set of three orthogonal states.