Atomic Interference Method for Direct Measurement of the Wigner Function of a Cavity Field

摘要

We propose a scheme for the reconstruction of a cavity field state.In the scheme the cavity field is first displaced by a microwave source,and then is placed in front of one slit of the two-slit apparatus.Ground state stoms pass through the apparatus,hitting upon the screen far away from the two-slit apparatus.The atom-field interaction is dispersive.The contrast of interference fringes is directly related to the Wigner function for the field state.The scheme can be easily generalized to measure the Wigner function of an entangled state of two spatially separated single-mode cavities.