Two-photon quantum state tomography of photonic qubits

We provide a tool for measuring the Stokes parameters and the degree of polarization of single photons by employing second-order interference, namely, the Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interferometer. It is shown that the technique is able to distinguish a partially polarized photon where the polarization state is coupled to an internal degree of freedom, such as time of arrival, from partial polarization due to external entanglement with the environment. The method does not directly resort to any kind of polarization-selective components and therefore is not limited by the extinction ratio of polarizers. Moreover, the technique can be generalized to any two-level encoding of quantum information in single photons, such as time-bin or orbital angular momentum qubits.