Multimode polarization degree of mixture optical states in integrated directional couplers |
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| Authors: | Jesús Liñares María C. Nistal |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Optics Area, Department of Applied Physics, Faculty of Physics and Faculty of Optics and Optometry , University of Santiago de Compostela , Campus Vida (Campus Universitario Sur) s/n, E-15782 Santiago de Compostela , Galicia , Spain suso.linares.beiras@usc.es;3. Optics Area, Department of Applied Physics, Faculty of Physics and Faculty of Optics and Optometry , University of Santiago de Compostela , Campus Vida (Campus Universitario Sur) s/n, E-15782 Santiago de Compostela , Galicia , Spain |
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| Abstract: | Mixture multimode optical field classical states propagating in N?×?N integrated directional couplers are analyzed by using the density matrix formalism in a N-dimensional optical space. These mutimode optical fields present a kind of generalized polarization and accordingly a definition of a multimode polarization degree is proposed. It is based on the distance measure between a mixture state and an unpolarized state in a N-dimensional optical space so that in the case N=2 the standard polarization degree is recovered. It is shown that directional couplers can reduce or increase remarkably the multimode polarization degree of a mixture state. Likewise a simple measurement technique, based on Y junctions, of this multimode polarization degree is proposed. Finally all the results can be formally extended to the special case of multimode single photon quantum states. |
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| Keywords: | integrated optics directional couplers polarization degree |
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