Conditions for factorizable output from a beam splitter

Abstract

A beam splitter is one of the most important devices in an optics laboratory because of its handiness and versatility; equivalent devices are found in various quantum systems to couple two subsystems or to interfere them. While it is normal that two independent input fields are superposed at the beam splitter to give correlated outputs, identical Gaussian states interfere there to produce totally independent output fields. We prove that the Gaussian states with same variances are the only states which bring about factorizable output fields.