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Generation and measurement of quantum states of the electromagnetic field represent a hot and widely discussed topic in the Physics community, since optical states are useful not only in fundamental experiments but also in several applications in the fields of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (Bouwmeester et al., 2000). In fact, optical radiation is endowed with relevant characteristics as it travels at maximum possible speed, it is almost unaffected by the interaction with the environment, which in many cases represents an unavoidable decoherence source, and it can be integrated in optoelectronic circuits to implement quantum computing protocols (Sansoni et al., 2010). The possibility of using optical fields in applicative protocols depends on the capability of generating and manipulating optical states that are robust with respect to losses (i.e. that contain a sizeable number of photons) and that can be produced and measured at high rate. For all these reasons, mesoscopic pulsed optical states containing few tens of photons per pulse seem to be the ideal candidates for applications to quantum communication protocols in which each pulse must be addressed individually. Moreover, the problem of generating suitable pulsed states must be considered together with the question of their measurement and characterization. In fact, nowadays we have many types of pulsed-light sources at our disposal, each of them characterized by different pulse durations (from few fs up to few ns), different pulse-repetition rates (from few Hz to 100 MHz) and a wide range of energies per pulse (from few nJ to several J). However, not all these pulsed light can be easily measured. In the mesoscopic intensity regime, for example, detectors endowed with photon-number resolution are required so as to determine shot-by-shot photon numbers or, at least, to characterize some features of the optical states. In fact, full characterization of the optical state, obtained e.g. by evaluating its Wigner function, can be achieved with optical homodyne tomography (OHT) (Raymer, 1997), a technique that over the years has proved its effectiveness in reconstructing both classical and quantum states, even if further optimizations are needed in the case of pulsed fields (Zavatta et al., 2006). Direct detection schemes are an alternative to OHT in all the cases in which knowing the statistics of detected photons is sufficient to characterize the signal state, as demonstrated in the pioneering work of Arecchi (Arecchi, 1965). Obviously, the implementation of a direct detection scheme requires a proper choice of the detector, the development of a calibration 11

Generation and Detection of Mesoscopic Pulsed States of Light for Quantum Information