No Arabic abstract
In this letter we experimentally demonstrate that the signal velocity, defined as the earliest time when a signal is detected above the realistic noise floor, may be altered by a region of anomalous dispersion. We encode information in the spatial degree of freedom of an optical pulse so that the imprinted information is not limited by the frequency bandwidth of the region of anomalous dispersion. We then show that the combination of superluminal pulse propagation and realistic detectors with non-ideal quantum efficiency leads to a speed-up of the earliest experimentally obtainable arrival time of the transmitted signal even with the overall pulse experiencing unity gain. This speed-up is reliant upon non-ideal detectors and losses, as perfect detection efficiency would result in the speed of information being equal to the speed of light in vacuum, regardless of the group velocity of the optical pulses.
Propagation of light pulses through negative group velocity media is known to give rise to a number of paradoxical situations that seem to violate causality. The solution of these paradoxes has triggered the investigation of a number of interesting and unexpected features of light propagation. Here we report a combined theoretical and experimental study of the ring-down oscillations in optical cavities filled with a medium with such a strongly negative frequency dispersion to give a negative round-trip group delay time. We theoretically anticipate that causality imposes the existence of additional resonance peaks in the cavity transmission, resulting in a non-exponential decay of the cavity field and in a breakdown of the cavity decay rate concept. Our predictions are validated by simulations and by an experiment using a room-temperature gas of metastable helium atoms in the detuned electromagnetically induced transparency regime as the cavity medium.
We demonstrate quantum entanglement of two trapped atomic ion qubits using a sequence of ultrafast laser pulses. Unlike previous demonstrations of entanglement mediated by the Coulomb interaction, this scheme does not require confinement to the Lamb-Dicke regime and can be less sensitive to ambient noise due to its speed. To elucidate the physics of an ultrafast phase gate, we generate a high entanglement rate using just 10 pulses, each of $sim20$ ps duration, and demonstrate an entangled Bell-state with $(76pm1)$% fidelity. These results pave the way for entanglement operations within a large collection of qubits by exciting only local modes of motion.
We present a direct measurement of the spatiotemporal coherence of parametric down-conversion in the range of negative group-velocity dispersion. In this case, the frequency-angular spectra are ring-shaped and temporal coherence is coupled to spatial coherence. Correspondingly, the lack of coherence due to spatial displacement can be compensated with the introduction of time delay. We show a simple technique, based on a modified Mach-Zehnder interferometer, which allowed us to measure time coherence and near-field space coherence simultaneously, with complete control of both variables. This technique will be also suitable for the measurement of second-order coherence, where the main applications are related to the two-photon spectroscopy.
We analyze the fundamental quantum limit of the resolution of an optical imaging system from the perspective of the detection problem of deciding whether the optical field in the image plane is generated by one incoherent on-axis source with brightness $epsilon$ or by two $epsilon/2$-brightness incoherent sources that are symmetrically disposed about the optical axis. Using the exact thermal-state model of the field, we derive the quantum Chernoff bound for the detection problem, which specifies the optimum rate of decay of the error probability with increasing number of collected photons that is allowed by quantum mechanics. We then show that recently proposed linear-optic schemes approach the quantum Chernoff bound---the method of binary spatial-mode demultiplexing (B-SPADE) is quantum-optimal for all values of separation, while a method using image-inversion interferometry (SLIVER) is near-optimal for sub-Rayleigh separations. We then simplify our model using a low-brightness approximation that is very accurate for optical microscopy and astronomy, derive quantum Chernoff bounds conditional on the number of photons detected, and show the optimality of our schemes in this conditional detection paradigm. For comparison, we analytically demonstrate the superior scaling of the Chernoff bound for our schemes with source separation relative to that of spatially-resolved direct imaging. Our schemes have the advantages over the quantum-optimal (Helstrom) measurement in that they do not involve joint measurements over multiple modes, and that they do not require the angular separation for the two-source hypothesis to be given emph{a priori} and can offer that information as a bonus in the event of a successful detection.
In recent proposals for achieving optical super-resolution, variants of the Quantum Fisher Information (QFI) quantify the attainable precision. We find that claims about a strong enhancement of the resolution resulting from coherence effects are questionable because they refer to very small subsets of the data without proper normalization. When the QFI is normalized, accounting for the strength of the signal, there is no advantage of coherent sources over incoherent ones. Our findings have a bearing on further studies of the achievable precision of optical instruments.