Nonclassicality and entanglement: observable conditions

A unified characterization of continuous-variable quantum states is presented that gives general insight in their nonclassical features and, in particular, in their entanglement properties. Nonclassicality is characterized in terms of observable characteristic functions. Equivalently, the nonclassicality conditions are reformulated in terms of moments. The latter approach turns out to be a powerful tool for deriving a complete set of entanglement conditions for bipartite quantum systems, which are fully equivalent to the nonpositivity of the partially transposed density operator. The possibilities of observing the needed moments by balanced homodyne correlation measurements are analyzed.