Abstract

A scheme for quantum-state tomography is presented that can be performed for polarized light with an arbitrary photon-number distribution. The proposed method fills the gap between existing polarization-tomography schemes for single-photon states and for optical fields with very large photon numbers. It consists of an optical homodyne setup triggered by the outcome of a single-photon counting module. The configuration space of polarization is parametrized by Euler angles and by an additional interference parameter, whose assessment requires conditional homodyne measurements.