Self-homodyne tomography of a twin-beam state

A self-homodyne detection scheme is proposed to perform two-mode tomography on a twin-beam state at the output of a nondegenerate optical parametric amplifier. This scheme has been devised to improve the matching between the local oscillator and the signal modes, which is the main limitation to the overall quantum efficiency in conventional homodyning. The feasibility of the measurement is analyzed on the basis of Monte-Carlo simulations, studying the effect of non-unit quantum efficiency on detection of the correlation and the total photon-number oscillations of the twin-beam state.Comment: 13 pages (two-column ReVTeX) including 21 postscript figures; to appear on Phys. Rev.