Quantum state tomography of an itinerant squeezed microwave field

Phys Rev Lett. 2011 Jun 3;106(22):220502. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.106.220502. Epub 2011 Jun 1.

Abstract

We perform state tomography of an itinerant squeezed state of the microwave field prepared by a Josephson parametric amplifier (JPA). We use a second JPA as a preamplifier to improve the quantum efficiency of the field quadrature measurement from 2% to 36%±4%. Without correcting for the detection inefficiency we observe a minimum quadrature variance which is 68(-7)(+9)% of the variance of the vacuum. We reconstruct the state's density matrix by a maximum likelihood method and infer that the squeezed state has a minimum variance less than 40% of the vacuum, with uncertainty mostly caused by calibration systematics.