Temporal Quantum-State Tomography of Narrowband Biphotons*

We demonstrate a technique of quantum-state tomography for measuring the complex temporal wave function of narrowband biphotons with polarization-dependent and time-resolved two-photon interference. While the amplitude function of the biphoton waveform is directly related to the second-order correlation function which is determined by the two-photon coincidence measurement, the phase function is retrieved from six sets of time-resolved two-photon interference measurements projected onto different polarization subspaces. We apply this technique to experimentally reconstruct the temporal quantum states of the narrow-band biphotons generated from the spontaneous four-wave mixing in cold atoms. As compared with the homodyne detection, our method doesn't require any external phase reference.