Direct sampling of the Susskind-Glogower phase distributions

Abstract

Coarse-grained phase distributions are introduced that approximate to the Susskind-Glogower cosine and sine phase distributions to any desired degree of accuracy. The integral relations between the phase distributions and the phase-parametrized field-strength distributions observable in balanced homodyning are derived and the integral kernels are analyzed. It is shown that the phase distributions can be directly sampled from the field-strength distributions which offers the possibility of measuring the Susskind-Glogower cosine and sine phase distributions with sufficiently high precision. Numerical simulations are performed to demonstrate the applicability of the method.