Digital homodyne and heterodyne detection for stationary bosonic modes

This paper presents a measurement scheme corresponding to homo-and heterodyne detection for stationary quantum states of light. These types of measurements are cornerstones in quantum optics and commonplace on propagating fields, but our method enables high-efficiency measurements also on confined cavity fields. Inspired by the “repeated interactions” model, which is normally used for calculations of open system dynamics, we show that a simple realization of the model can emulate both homo- and heterodyne measurements statistics. This has applications in quantum computing, for instance, in verification of quantum speedup for boson sampling that could be implemented with current and near-term technology.