We investigate temporal effects in pulsed squeezing by parametric amplification, including effects of group-velocity dispersion. Our calculations show that the local oscillator pulse used to detect the squeezed field cannot be made shorter than the inverse phase-matching bandwidth of the generation process without degrading the amount of squeezing detected. This result generalizes an earlier result that showed that in the absence of dispersion, the local oscillator pulse duration should approach zero for optimum squeezing detection. We further show that by using local oscillator amplitude and phase pulse shaping it should be possible to achieve more than 40 dB of detectable quadrature squeezing. This is applicable where it is possible to neglect transverse spatial dimensions and diffraction, such as in a waveguide. We derive the s-parametrized quasiprobability evolution equation for the traveling-wave parametric amplifier. As the Wigner representation results in third-order derivatives, we also use the positive-P representation as an exact representation with equivalent Ito stochastic differential equations. This allows us to compare approximate — but easily simulated — Wigner representation results with those using the positive-P representation.

• Received 18 January 1995

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.52.4202