Speckle structure of parametric down conversion light has recently received a large attention due to relevance in view of applications to quantum imaging The possibility of tailoring the speckle size by acting on the pump properties is an interesting tool for the applications to quantum imaging and in particular to the detection of weak object under shot-noise limit. Here we present a systematic detailed experimental study of the speckle structure produced in type II PDC with particular attention to its variation with pump beam properties.
Sub shot noise imaging of weak object by exploiting Parametric Down Converted light represents a very interesting technological development. A precise characterization of PDC speckle structure in dependence of pump beam parameters is a fundamental tool for this application. In this paper we present a first set of data addressed to this purpose.
Speckle interferometry is an established optical metrology tool for the characterization of rough objects. The raw phase, however, is impaired by the presence of phase singularities, making the unwrapping procedure ambiguous. In a Michelson setup, we tailor the spatial coherence of the light source, achieving a physical averaging of independent, mutually incoherent speckle fields. In the resulting raw phase, the systematic phase is preserved while the number of phase singularities is greatly reduced. Both interferometer arms are affected by the averaging. The reduction is sufficient to even allow the use of a standard unwrapping algorithm originally developed for smooth surfaces only.
Hybrid quantum information processing combines the advantages of discrete and continues variable protocols by realizing protocols consisting of photon counting and homodyne measurements. However, the mode structure of pulsed sources and the properties of the detection schemes often require the use optical filters in order to combine both detection methods in a common experiment. This limits the efficiency and the overall achievable squeezing of the experiment. In our work, we use photon subtraction to implement the distillation of pulsed squeezed states originating from a genuinely spatially and temporally single-mode parametric down-conversion source in non-linear waveguides. Due to the distillation, we witness an improvement of $0.17~mathrm{dB}$ from an initial squeezing value of $-1.648 pm 0.002~mathrm{dB}$, while achieving a purity of $0.58$, and confirm the non-Gaussianity of the distilled state via the higher-order cumulants. With this, we demonstrate the sources suitability for scalable hybrid quantum network applications with pulsed quantum light.
We study Anderson localization of single particles in continuous, correlated, one-dimensional disordered potentials. We show that tailored correlations can completely change the energy-dependence of the localization length. By considering two suitable models of disorder, we explicitly show that disorder correlations can lead to a nonmonotonic behavior of the localization length versus energy. Numerical calculations performed within the transfer-matrix approach and analytical calculations performed within the phase formalism up to order three show excellent agreement and demonstrate the effect. We finally show how the nonmonotonic behavior of the localization length with energy can be observed using expanding ultracold-atom gases.
A highly anticipated use of quantum computers is the simulation of complex quantum systems including molecules and other many-body systems. One promising method involves directly applying a linear combination of unitaries (LCU) to approximate a Taylor series by truncating after some order. Here we present an adaptation of that method, optimized for Hamiltonians with terms of widely varying magnitude, as is commonly the case in electronic structure calculations. We show that it is more efficient to apply LCU using a truncation that retains larger magnitude terms as determined by an iterative procedure. We obtain bounds on the simulation error for this generalized truncated Taylor method, and for a range of molecular simulations we report these bounds as well as direct numerical emulation results. We find that our adaptive method can typically improve the simulation accuracy by an order of magnitude, for a given circuit depth.