Direct measurement of optical quasidistribution functions:: Multimode theory and homodyne tests of Bell's inequalities -: art. no. 043803

We develop a multimode theory of direct homodyne measurements of quantum optical quasidistribution functions. We demonstrate that unbalanced homodyning with appropriately shaped auxiliary coherent fields allows one to sample point-by-point different phase-space representations of the electromagnetic field. Our analysis includes practical factors that are likely to affect the outcome of a realistic experiment, such as nonunit detection efficiency, imperfect mode matching, and dark counts. We apply the developed theory to discuss feasibility of observing a loophole-free violation of Bell's inequalities by measuring joint two-mode quasidistribution functions by photon counting under locality conditions. We determine the range of parameters of the experimental setup that enable violation of Bell's inequalities for two states exhibiting entanglement in the Fock basis: a one-photon Fock state divided by a 50:50 beam splitter, and a two-mode squeezed vacuum state produced in the process of nondegenerate parametric down-conversion.