No Arabic abstract
Photonic qubits constitute a leading platform to disruptive quantum technologies due to their unique low-noise properties. The cost of the photonic approach is the non-deterministic nature of many of the processes, including single-photon generation, which arises from parametric sources and negligible interaction between photons. Active temporal multiplexing - repeating a generation process in time and rerouting to single modes using an optical switching network - is a promising approach to overcome this challenge and will likely be essential for large-scale applications with greatly reduced resource complexity and system sizes. Requirements include the precise synchronization of a system of low-loss switches, delay lines, fast photon detectors, and feed-forward. Here we demonstrate temporal multiplexing of 8 bins from a double-passed heralded photon source and observe an increase in the heralding and heralded photon rates. This system points the way to harnessing temporal multiplexing in quantum technologies, from single-photon sources to large-scale computation.
We demonstrate multiphoton interference using a resource-efficient frequency multiplexing scheme, suitable for quantum information applications that demand multiple indistinguishable and pure single photons. In our source, frequency-correlated photon pairs are generated over a wide range of frequencies by pulsed parametric down conversion. Indistinguishable single photons of a predetermined frequency are prepared using frequency-resolved detection of one photon to control an electro-optic frequency shift applied to its partner. Measured photon statistics show multiplexing increases the probability of delivering a single photon, without a corresponding increase to multiphoton events. Interference of consecutive outputs is used to bound the single-photon purity and demonstrate the non-classical nature of the emitted light.
We prepare heralded single photons from a photon pair source based on non-degenerate four-wave mixing in a cold atomic ensemble via a cascade decay scheme. Their statistics shows strong antibunching with g(2)(0) < 0.03, indicating a near single photon character. In an optical homodyne experiment, we directly measure the temporal envelope of these photons and find, depending on the heralding scheme, an exponentially decaying or rising profile. The rising envelope will be useful for efficient interaction between single photons and microscopic systems like single atoms and molecules. At the same time, their observation illustrates the breakdown of a realistic interpretation of the heralding process in terms of defining an initial condition of a physical system.
We propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel approach to a heralded single photon source based on spectral multiplexing (SMUX) and feed-forward-based spectral manipulation of photons created by means of spontaneous parametric down-conversion in a periodically-poled LiNbO3 crystal. As a proof-of-principle, we show that our 3-mode SMUX increases the heralded single-photon rate compared to that of the individual modes without compromising the quality of the emitted single-photons. We project that by adding further modes, our approach can lead to a deterministic SPS.
A number of recent interference experiments involving multiple photons are reviewed. These experiments include generalized photon bunching effects, generalized Hong-Ou-Mandel interference effects and multi-photon interferometry for demonstrations of multi-photon de Broglie wavelength. The multi-photon states used in these experiments are from two pairs of photons in parametric down-conversion. We find that the size of the interference effect in these experiments, characterized by the visibility of interference pattern, is governed by the degree of distinguishability among different pairs of photons. Based on this discovery, we generalize the concept of multi-photon temporal distinguishability and relate it to a number of multi-photon interference effects. Finally, we make an attempt to interpret the coherence theory by the multi-photon interference via the concept of temporal distinguishability of photons.
We report on the implementation of a new interferometric scheme that allows the generation of photon pairs entangled in the time-energy degree of freedom. This scheme does not require any kind of temporal post-selection on the generated pairs and can be used even with lasers with short coherence time.