Limits for realizing single photons

Abstract

Exact single photons cannot be generated on demand due to their infinite tails. To quantify how close realizable optical states can be to some target single photon in one dimension, we argue that there are two natural but incompatible ways to specify the target state. Either it can be expressed as a photon with a chosen positive-frequency spectrum, or it can be described as an (unphysical) photon in a chosen positive-time pulse. The results show that for sufficiently short target pulses, the closest realizable states contain substantial multiphoton components. Upper and lower bounds for the maximum fidelity are derived and are expressed as functions of the size of the target state's tail, for negative time or negative frequency, respectively. We also generalize the bounds to arbitrary photon-number states.