No Arabic abstract
An entangled photon experiment has been performed with a large variation of the temperature of the non-linear crystal generating the entangled pair by spontaneous downconversion. The photon pairs are separated by a nonpolarizing beamsplitter, and the polarization modes are mixed by half wave plates. The correlation function of the coincidences is studied as a function of the temperature. In the presence of a narrow interference filter we observe that the correlation changes between -1 and +1 about seven times within a temperature interval of about 30 degrees C. We show that the common simplified single-mode pair representation of entangled photons is insufficient to describe the results, but that the biphoton description that includes frequency and phase details gives close to perfect fit with experimental data for two different choices of interference filters. We explain the main ideas of the underlying physics, and give an interpretation of the two-photon amplitude which provides an intuitive understanding of the effect of changing the temperature and inserting interference filters.
Pairs of photons entangled in their time-frequency degree of freedom are of great interest in quantum optics research and applications, due to their relative ease of generation and their high capacity for encoding information. Here we analyze, both theoretically and experimentally, the behavior of phase-insensitive spectrally-resolved interferences arising from two pairs of time-frequency entangled photons. At its core, this is a multimode entanglement swapping experiment, whereby a spectrally resolved joint measurement on the idler photons from both pairs results in projecting the signal photons onto a Bell state whose form depends on the measurement outcome. Our analysis is a thorough exploration of what can be achieved using time-frequency entanglement and spectrally-resolved Bell-state measurements.
We study the interference structure of the second-order intensity correlation function for polarization-entangled two-photon light obtained from type-II collinear frequency-degenerate spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC). The structure is visualised due to the spreading of the two-photon amplitude as two-photon light propagates through optical fibre with group-velocity dispersion (GVD). Because of the spreading, polarization-entangled Bell states can be obtained without any birefringence compensation at the output of the nonlinear crystal; instead, proper time selection of the intensity correlation function is required. A birefringent material inserted at the output of the nonlinear crystal (either reducing the initial o-e delay between the oppositely polarized twin photons or increasing this delay) leads to a more complicated interference structure of the correlation function.
The generation and manipulation of entanglement between isolated particles has precipitated rapid progress in quantum information processing. Entanglement is also known to play an essential role in the optical properties of atomic ensembles, but fundamental effects in the controlled emission and absorption from small, well-defined numbers of entangled emitters in free space have remained unobserved. Here we present the control of the spontaneous emission rate of a single photon from a pair of distant, entangled atoms into a free-space optical mode. Changing the length of the optical path connecting the atoms modulates the emission rate with a visibility $V = 0.27 pm 0.03$ determined by the degree of entanglement shared between the atoms, corresponding directly to the concurrence $mathcal{C_{rho}}= 0.31 pm 0.10$ of the prepared state. This scheme, together with population measurements, provides a fully optical determination of the amount of entanglement. Furthermore, large sensitivity of the interference phase evolution points to applications of the presented scheme in high-precision gradient sensing.
While two-photon absorption (TPA) and other forms of nonlinear interactions of molecules with isolated time-frequency-entangled photon pairs (EPP) have been predicted to display a variety of fascinating effects, their potential use in practical quantum-enhanced molecular spectroscopy requires close examination. This paper presents a detailed theoretical study of quantum-enhanced TPA by both photon-number correlations and spectral correlations, including an account of the deleterious effects of dispersion. While such correlations in EPP created by spontaneous parametric down conversion can increase the TPA rate significantly in the regime of extremely low optical flux, we find that for typical molecules in solution this regime corresponds to such low TPA event rates as to be unobservable in practice. Our results support the usefulness of EPP spectroscopy in atomic or other narrow-linewidth systems, while questioning the efficacy of such approaches for broadband systems including molecules in solution.
We report an electrically driven semiconductor single photon source capable of emitting photons with a coherence time of up to 400 ps under fixed bias. It is shown that increasing the injection current causes the coherence time to reduce and this effect is well explained by the fast modulation of a fluctuating environment. Hong-Ou-Mandel type two-photon interference using a Mach-Zehnder interferometer is demonstrated using this source to test the indistinguishability of individual photons by post-selecting events where two photons collide at a beamsplitter. Finally, we consider how improvements in our detection system can be used to achieve a higher interference visibility.