REALISTIC OPTICAL HOMODYNE MEASUREMENTS AND QUASI-PROBABILITY DISTRIBUTIONS

The deteriorating effect of low-efficiency detectors in different schemes suitable for a direct measurement of the Q function and in optical homodyne tomography is studied in some detail. It turns out that this effect amounts to smoothing the respective quasiprobability distribution that would be measured with unit-efficiency detectors. Our main result is that those smoothed distributions can be identified with certain s-parametrized quasiprobability distributions. Thus the latter gain direct experimental significance as distributions measurable under realistic experimental conditions.