Abstract

With the exception of squeezing, the generation and the detection of nonclassical light is experimentally challenging. We suggest a simple experimental scheme to verify the quantum nature of light in a state as nonclassical as a Fock number state. The main feature of our experimental scheme is its robustness against the possible imperfections of the setup, such as finite gain of the parametric generator, nonunit detector efficiency and occurrence of dark counts.

© 2001 EPS