A single-photon Fock state has been generated by means of conditional preparation from a two-photon state emitted in the process of spontaneous parametric down-conversion. A recently developed high-frequency homodyne tomography technique has been used to completely characterize the Fock state by means of a pulse-to-pulse analysis of the detectors' difference photocurrent. The density matrix elements of the generated state have been retrieved with a final detection efficiency of about 57%. A comparison has been performed between the phase-averaged tomographic reconstructions of the Wigner function as obtained from the measured density-matrix elements and from a direct Abel transform of the homodyne data. The ability of our system to work at the full repetition rate of the pulsed laser $\left(82\mathrm{MHz}\right)$ substantially simplifies the detection scheme, allowing for more “exotic” quantum states to be generated and analyzed.

• Received 14 June 2004

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.70.053821