We report an experiment in which two-photon interference occurs between degenerate single photons that never meet. The two photons travel in opposite directions through our fibre-optic interferometer and interference occurs when the photons reach two different, spatially separated, 2-by-2 couplers at the same time. We show that this experiment is analogous to the conventional Franson-type entanglement experiment where the photons are entangled in position and time. We measure wavefunction overlaps for the two photons as high as 94 $pm$ 3%.
Channel position finding is the task of determining the location of a single target channel amongst an ensemble of background channels. It has many potential applications, including quantum sensing, quantum reading and quantum spectroscopy. In particular, it could allow for simple detection protocols to be extended to ones of measurement, for example, target ranging with quantum illumination. The use of quantum states and entanglement in such protocols have shown to yield quantum advantages over their optimal classical counterparts. Here we consider quantum channel position finding using sources specified by at most one single photon on average per mode, using the discrete variable formalism. By considering various quantum sources it is shown through the derivation of performance bounds that a quantum enhancement may be realised.
Quantum communication holds promise for absolutely security in secret message transmission. Quantum secure direct communication is an important mode of the quantum communication in which secret messages are securely communicated over a quantum channel directly. It has become one of the hot research areas in the last decade, and offers both high security and instantaneousness in communication. It is also a basic cryptographic primitive for constructing other quantum communication tasks such as quantum authentication, quantum dialogue and so on. Here we report the first experimental demonstration of quantum secure direct communication with single photons. The experiment is based on the DL04 protocol, equipped with a simple frequency coding. It has the advantage of being robust against channel noise and loss. The experiment demonstrated explicitly the block data transmission technique, which is essential for quantum secure direct communication. In the experiment, a block transmission of 80 single photons was demonstrated over fiber, and it provides effectively 16 different values, which is equivalent to 4 bits of direct transmission in one block. The experiment has firmly demonstrated the feasibility of quantum secure direct communication in the presence of noise and loss.
The phenomenon of quantum entanglement marks one of the furthest departures from classical physics and is indispensable for quantum information processing. Despite its fundamental importance, the distribution of entanglement over long distances trough photons is unfortunately hindered by unavoidable decoherence effects. Entanglement distillation is a means of restoring the quality of such diluted entanglement by concentrating it into a pair of qubits. Conventionally, this would be done by distributing multiple photon pairs and distilling the entanglement into a single pair. Here, we turn around this paradigm by utilising pairs of single photons entangled in multiple degrees of freedom. Specifically, we make use of the polarisation and the energy-time domain of photons, both of which are extensively field-tested. We experimentally chart the domain of distillable states and achieve relative fidelity gains up to 13.8 %. Compared to the two-copy scheme, the distillation rate of our single-copy scheme is several orders of magnitude higher, paving the way towards high-capacity and noise-resilient quantum networks.
We perform experimental quantum polarimetry using a heralded single photon to analyze the optical activity of linearly polarized light traversing a chiral medium. Three kinds of estimators are considered to estimate the concentrations of sucrose solutions from measuring the rotation angle of the linear polarization of the output photons. Through repetition of independent and identical measurements performed for each individual scheme and different concentration sucrose solutions, we compare the estimation uncertainty among the three schemes. The results are also compared to classical benchmarks for which a coherent state of light is taken into account. The quantum enhancement in the estimation uncertainty is evaluated and the impact of experimental and technical imperfections is discussed. In this work, we lay out a route for future applications relying on quantum polarimetry.
Time-bin entangled photons are ideal for long-distance quantum communication via optical fibers. Here we present a source where, even at high creation rates, each excitation pulse generates at most one time-bin entangled pair. This is important for the accuracy and security of quantum communication. Our site-controlled quantum dot generates single polarization-entangled photon pairs, which are then converted, without loss of entanglement strength, into single time-bin entangled photon pairs.