Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
A homodyne detector measures a field-amplitude component of the incoming signal. If the incoming signal is in an n-photon eigenstate the homodyne detector's output probability distribution exhibits n fringes. Here the degree to which the visibility of these fringes is degraded by a homodyne detector with less than unit quantum efficiency is evaluated. An experiment employing conjugate pairs of photons generated via a parametric down conversion or four-wave mixing is proposed by which these fringes could be observed.
Yurke et al. (Sat,) studied this question.