Classical distinguishability as an operational measure of polarization

We put forward an operational degree of polarization that can be extended in a natural way to fields whose wave fronts are not necessarily planar. This measure appears as a distance from a state to the set of all of its polarization-transformed counterparts. By using the Hilbert-Schmidt metric, the...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Björk, G., de Guise, H., Klimov, Andrei B., Hoz Iglesias, Pablo de la, Sánchez Soto, Luis Lorenzo
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2014
País:España
Institución:Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM)
Repositorio:Docta Complutense
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:docta.ucm.es:20.500.14352/33947
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/33947
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:535
Hilbert-Schmidt distance
Quantum states
Electromagnetic-fields
Unpolarized radiation
Statistical distance
Correlation-matrices
Relative entropy
3 dimensions
Entanglement
Coherence.
Óptica (Física)
2209.19 Óptica Física
Descripción
Sumario:We put forward an operational degree of polarization that can be extended in a natural way to fields whose wave fronts are not necessarily planar. This measure appears as a distance from a state to the set of all of its polarization-transformed counterparts. By using the Hilbert-Schmidt metric, the resulting degree is a sum of two terms: one is the purity of the state and the other can be interpreted as a classical distinguishability, which can be experimentally determined in an interferometric setup. For transverse fields, this reduces to the standard approach, whereas it allows one to get a straight expression for nonparaxial fields.