No Arabic abstract
We devise an approach to characterizing the intricate interplay between classical and quantum interference of two-photon states in a network, which comprises multiple time-bin modes. By controlling the phases of delocalized single photons, we manipulate the global mode structure, resulting in distinct two-photon interference phenomena for time-bin resolved (local) and time-bucket (global) coincidence detection. This coherent control over the photons mode structure allows for synthesizing two-photon interference patterns, where local measurements yield standard Hong-Ou-Mandel dips while the global two-photon visibility is governed by the overlap of the delocalized single-photon states. Thus, our experiment introduces a method for engineering distributed quantum interferences in networks.
We present a quantum fingerprinting protocol relying on two-photon interference which does not require a shared phase reference between the parties preparing optical signals carrying data fingerprints. We show that the scaling of the protocol, in terms of transmittable classical information, is analogous to the recently proposed and demonstrated scheme based on coherent pulses and first-order interference, offering comparable advantage over classical fingerprinting protocols without access to shared prior randomness. We analyze the protocol taking into account non-Poissonian photon statistics of optical signals and a variety of imperfections, such as transmission losses, dark counts, and residual distinguishability. The impact of these effects on the protocol performance is quantified with the help of Chernoff information.
Structured photons are nowadays an interesting resource in classical and quantum optics due to the richness of properties they show under propagation, focusing and in their interaction with matter. Vectorial modes of light in particular, a class of modes where the polarization varies across the beam profile, have already been used in several areas ranging from microscopy to quantum information. One of the key ingredients needed to exploit the full potential of complex light in quantum domain is the control of quantum interference, a crucial resource in fields like quantum communication, sensing and metrology. Here we report a tunable photon-photon interference between vectorial modes of light. We demonstrate how a properly designed spin-orbit device can be used to control quantum interference between vectorial modes of light by simply adjusting the device parameters and no need of interferometric setups. We believe our result can find applications in fundamental research and quantum technologies based on structured light by providing a new tool to control quantum interference in a compact, efficient and robust way.
Quantum networks involve entanglement sharing between multiple users. Ideally, any two users would be able to connect regardless of the type of photon source they employ, provided they fulfill the requirements for two-photon interference. From a theoretical perspective, photons coming from different origins can interfere with a perfect visibility, provided they are made indistinguishable in all degrees of freedom. Previous experimental demonstrations of such a scenario have been limited to photon wavelengths below 900 nm, unsuitable for long distance communication, and suffered from low interference visibility. We report two-photon interference using two disparate heralded single photon sources, which involve different nonlinear effects, operating in the telecom wavelength range. The measured visibility of the two-photon interference is 80+/-4%, which paves the way to hybrid universal quantum networks.
We employ active feedback to stabilize the frequency of single photons emitted by two separate quantum dots to an atomic standard. The transmission of a single, rubidium-based Faraday filter serves as the error signal for frequency stabilization to less than 1.5% of the emission linewidth. Long-term stability is demonstrated by Hong-Ou-Mandel interference between photons from the two quantum dots. The observed visibility of $V_{mathrm{lock}}=(41 pm 5)$% is limited only by internal dephasing of the dots. Our approach facilitates quantum networks with indistinguishable photons from distributed emitters.
We collect the fluorescence from two trapped atomic ions, and measure quantum interference between photons emitted from the ions. The interference of two photons is a crucial component of schemes to entangle atomic qubits based on a photonic coupling. The ability to preserve the generated entanglement and to repeat the experiment with the same ions is necessary to implement entangling quantum gates between atomic qubits, and allows the implementation of protocols to efficiently scale to larger numbers of atomic qubits.