No Arabic abstract
We report the experimental observation of the nonlocal geometric phase in Hanbury Brown-Twiss polarized intensity interferometry. The experiment involves two independent, polar- ized, incoherent sources, illuminating two polarized detectors. Varying the relative polarization angle between the detectors introduces a geometric phase equal to half the solid angle on the Poincare sphere traced out by a pair of single photons. Local measurements at either detector do not reveal the effect of the geometric phase, which appears only in the coincidence counts between the two detectors, showing a genuinely nonlocal effect. We show experimentally that coincidence rates of photon arrival times at separated detectors can be controlled by the two photon geometric phase. This effect can be used for manipulating and controlling photonic entanglement.
We present a split-beam neutron interferometric experiment to test the non-cyclic geometric phase tied to the spatial evolution of the system: the subjacent two-dimensional Hilbert space is spanned by the two possible paths in the interferometer and the evolution of the state is controlled by phase shifters and absorbers. A related experiment was reported previously by some of the authors [Hasegawa et al., PRA 53, 2486 (1996)] to verify the cyclic spatial geometric phase. The interpretation of this experiment, namely to ascribe a geometric phase to this particular state evolution, has met severe criticism [Wagh, PRA 59, 1715 (1999)]. The extension to non-cyclic evolution manifests the correctness of the interpretation of the previous experiment by means of an explicit calculation of the non-cyclic geometric phase in terms of paths on the Bloch-sphere. The theoretical treatment comprises the cyclic geometric phase as a special case, which is confirmed by experiment.
Non-reciprocal devices are of increasing interest in quantum information technologies. This paper examines whether the presence of a non-reciprocal device in an optical channel is detectable by the communicating parties. We find that a non-reciprocal device such as a Faraday Rotator results in a measurable geometric phase for the light propagating through the channel and that, when using entangled photon pairs, the resulting phase is non-local and robust against malicious manipulation.
We investigate the origin of imperfections in the fidelity of a two-photon controlled-phase gate based on two-level-emitter non-linearities. We focus on a passive system that operates without external modulations to enhance its performance. We demonstrate that the fidelity of the gate is limited by opposing requirements on the input pulse width for one- and two-photon scattering events. For one-photon scattering, the spectral pulse width must be narrow compared to the emitter linewidth, while two-photon scattering processes require the pulse width and emitter linewidth to be comparable. We find that these opposing requirements limit the maximum fidelity of the two-photon controlled-phase gate for Gaussian photon pulses to 84%.
We experimentally simulate in a photonic setting non-Hermitian (NH) metals characterized by the topological properties of their nodal band structures. Implementing nonunitary time evolution in reciprocal space followed by interferometric measurements, we probe the complex eigenenergies of the corresponding NH Bloch Hamiltonians, and study in detail the topology of their exceptional lines (ELs), the NH counterpart of nodal lines in Hermitian systems. We focus on two distinct types of NH metals: two-dimensional systems with symmetry-protected ELs, and three-dimensional systems possessing symmetry-independent topological ELs in the form of knots. While both types feature open Fermi surfaces, we experimentally observe their distinctions by analyzing the impact of symmetry-breaking perturbations on the topology of ELs.
Path-entangled multi-photon states allow optical phase-sensing beyond the shot-noise limit, provided that an efficient parity measurement can be implemented. Realising this experimentally is technologically demanding, as it requires coincident single-photon detection proportional to the number of photons involved, which represents a severe challenge for achieving a practical quantum advantage over classical methods. Here, we exploit advanced quantum state engineering based on superposing two photon-pair creation events to realise a new approach that bypasses this issue. In particular, optical phase shifts are probed with a two-photon quantum state whose information is subsequently effectively transferred to a single-photon state. Notably, without any multiphoton detection, we infer phase shifts by measuring the average intensity of the single-photon beam on a photodiode, in analogy to standard classical measurements. Importantly, our approach maintains the quantum advantage: twice as many interference fringes are observed for the same phase shift, corresponding to N=2 path-entangled photons. Our results demonstrate that the advantages of quantum-enhanced phase-sensing can be fully exploited in standard intensity measurements, paving the way towards resource-efficient and practical quantum optical metrology.