Direct sampling of exponential phase moments of smoothed Wigner functions

Abstract

We investigate exponential phase moments of the s-parametrized quasidistributions (smoothed Wigner functions). We show that the knowledge of these moments as functions of s provides, together with photon-number statistics, a complete description of the quantum state. We demonstrate that the exponential phase moments can be directly sampled from the data recorded in balanced homodyne detection and we present simple expressions for the sampling kernels. The phase moments are Fourier coefficients of phase distributions obtained from the quasidistributions via integration over the radial variable in polar coordinates. We performed Monte Carlo simulations of the homodyne detection and we demonstrate the feasibility of direct sampling of the moments and subsequent reconstruction of the phase distribution.