We measure the population distribution in one of the atomic twin beams generated by four-wave mixing in an optical lattice. Although the produced two-mode squeezed vacuum state is pure, each individual mode is described as a statistical mixture. We confirm the prediction that the particle number follows an exponential distribution when only one spatio-temporal mode is selected. We also show that this distribution accounts well for the contrast of an atomic Hong--Ou--Mandel experiment. These experiments constitute an important validation of our twin beam source in view of a future test of a Bell inequalities.
In this paper, we study the interaction between the two-level atom and a bimodal cavity field, namely, two-mode Jaynes-Cummings model when the atom and the modes are initially in the atomic superposition state and two-mode squeezed vacuum state, respectively. For this system we investigate the atomic inversion, linear entropy and atomic Wehrl entropy. We show that there is a connection between all these quantities. Also we prove that the atomic Wehrl entropy exhibits behaviors similar to those of the linear entropy and the von Neumann entropy. Moreover, we show that the bipartite exhibits periodical disentanglement and derive the explicit forms of the states of the atom and the modes at these values of the interaction times.
Multipartite entanglement is a key resource for various quantum information tasks. Here, we present a scheme for generating genuine tripartite entanglement via nonlinear optical processes. We derive, in the Fock basis, the corresponding output state which we termed the coupled three-mode squeezed vacuum. We find unintuitive behaviors arise in intensity squeezing between two of the three output modes due to the coupling present. We also show that this state can be genuinely tripartite entangled.
A proposed phase-estimation protocol based on measuring the parity of a two-mode squeezed-vacuum state at the output of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer shows that the Cram{e}r-Rao sensitivity is sub-Heisenberg [Phys. Rev. Lett. {bf104}, 103602 (2010)]. However, these measurements are problematic, making it unclear if this sensitivity can be obtained with a finite number of measurements. This sensitivity is only for phase near zero, and in this region there is a problem with ambiguity because measurements cannot distinguish the sign of the phase. Here, we consider a finite number of parity measurements, and show that an adaptive technique gives a highly accurate phase estimate regardless of the phase. We show that the Heisenberg limit is reachable, where the number of trials needed for mean photon number $bar{n}=1$ is approximately one hundred. We show that the Cram{e}r-Rao sensitivity can be achieved approximately, and the estimation is unambiguous in the interval ($-pi/2, pi/2$).
We suggest and demonstrate a scheme to reconstruct the symmetric two-mode squeezed thermal states of spectral sideband modes from an optical parametric oscillator. The method is based on a single homodyne detector and active stabilization of the cavity. The measurement scheme have been successfully tested on different two-mode squeezed thermal states, ranging from uncorrelated coherent states to entangled states.
Bright squeezed vacuum, a macroscopic nonclassical state of light, can be obtained at the output of a strongly pumped non-seeded traveling-wave optical parametric amplifier (OPA). By constructing the OPA of two consecutive crystals separated by a large distance we make the squeezed vacuum spatially single-mode without a significant decrease in the brightness or squeezing.