Optical homodyne tomography of information carrying laser beams

Optical homodyne tomography (OHT) is a tool that allows the reconstruction of Wigner functions for each detection frequency of a propagating optical beam. It can measure probability distribution functions (PDF's) of the field amplitude for any given quadrature of interest. We demonstrate OHT for a range of classical optical states with constant and time varying modulations and show the advantage of OHT over conventional homodyne detection. The OHT simultaneously determines the signal to noise ratio in both amplitude and phase quadratures. We show that highly non-Gaussian Wigner functions can be obtained from incoherent superpositions of optical states.