Eur. Phys. J. D (2013) 67: 60
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2013-30739-8

Regular Article

The photodetection process under the conditions of an imperfect measurement device

Saint-Petersburg National Research University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics 49 Kronverksky Avenue, 197101 Saint Petersburg, Russia

^a e-mail: gpmirosh@gmail.com
^b e-mail: alextrifanov@gmail.com

Received: 11 December 2012
Received in final form: 21 January 2013
Published online: 21 March 2013

Abstract

The process of cavity mode quantum state photodetection subject to a nonideal measurement device is under consideration. A set of nonorthogonal probabilistic operator valued measures (POVM’s) describing the photodetection process is suggested. The superoperators of conditional system evolution and their Kraus representations are obtained. Developed formalism is used to the quantum state reconstruction problem. We recalculate the probabilities of hypotheses about the initial state of cavity quantum mode in the case of unknown superposition of vacuum and single photon states.