The knowledge and thus characterization of the temporal modes of quantum light fields is important in many areas of quantum physics ranging from experimental setup diagnosis to fundamental-physics investigations. Recent results showed how the autocorrelation function computed from continuous-wave homodyne measurements can be a powerful way to access the temporal mode structure. Here, we push forward this method by providing a deeper understanding and by showing how to extract the amplitude and phase of the temporal mode function with reduced experimental resources. Moreover, a quantitative analysis allows us to identify a regime of parameters where the method provides a trustworthy reconstruction, which we illustrate experimentally.

• Received 29 May 2019
• Revised 16 November 2019

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.101.013801