Multi-mode density matrices of light via amplitude and phase control

A new method is described for determining the quantum state of correlated multimode radiation by interfering the modes and measuring the statistics of the superimposed fields in four-port balanced homodyne detection. The full information on the N-mode quantum state is obtained by controlling both the relative amplitudes and the phases of the modes, which simplifies the reconstruction of density matrices to only N + 1 Fourier transforms. In particular, this method yields time-correlated multimode density matrices of optical pulses by superimposing the signal by a sequence of short local-oscillator pulses.