No Arabic abstract
We demonstrate optical coherence tomography based on an SU(1,1) nonlinear interferometer with high-gain parametric down-conversion. For imaging and sensing applications, this scheme promises to outperform previous experiments working at low parametric gain, since higher photon fluxes provide lower integration times for obtaining high-quality images. In this way one can avoid using single-photon detectors or CCD cameras with very high sensitivities, and standard spectrometers can be used instead. Other advantages are: higher sensitivity to small loss and amplification before detection, so that the detected light power considerably exceeds the probing one.
We demonstrate a different scheme to perform optical sectioning of a sample based on the concept of induced coherence [Zou et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 67, 318 (1991)]. This can be viewed as a different type of optical coherence tomography scheme where the varying reflectivity of the sample along the direction of propagation of an optical beam translates into changes of the degree of first-order coherence between two beams. As a practical advantage the scheme allows probing the sample with one wavelength and measuring photons with another wavelength. In a bio-imaging scenario, this would result in a deeper penetration into the sample because of probing with longer wavelengths, while still using the optimum wavelength for detection. The scheme proposed here could achieve submicron axial resolution by making use of nonlinear parametric sources with broad spectral bandwidth emission.
High gain parametric amplifier with a single-pass pulsed pump is known to generate broadband twin photon fields that are entangled in amplitude and phase but have complicated spectral correlation. Fortunately, they can be decomposed into independent temporal modes. But the common treatment of parametric interaction Hamiltonian does not consider the issue of time ordering problem of interaction Hamiltonian and thus leads to incorrect conclusion that the mode structure and the temporal mode functions do not change as the gain increases. In this paper, we use an approach that is usually employed for treating nonlinear interferometers and avoids the time ordering issue. This allows us to derive an evolution equation in differential-integral form. Numerical solutions for high gain situation indicate a gain-dependent mode structure that has its mode distributions changed and mode functions broadened as the gain increases.
Phase-sensitive optical parametric amplification of squeezed states helps to overcome detection loss and noise and thus increase the robustness of sub-shot-noise sensing. Because such techniques, e.g., imaging and spectroscopy, operate with multimode light, multimode amplification is required. Here we find the optimal methods for multimode phase-sensitive amplification and verify them in an experiment where a pumped second-order nonlinear crystal is seeded with a Gaussian coherent beam. Phase-sensitive amplification is obtained by tightly focusing the seed into the crystal, rather than seeding with close-to-plane waves. This suggests that phase-sensitive amplification of sub-shot-noise images should be performed in the near field. Similar recipe can be formulated for the time and frequency, which makes this work relevant for quantum-enhanced spectroscopy.
Quantum nonlinear interferometers (QNIs) can measure the infrared physical quantities of a sample by detecting visible photons. A QNI with Michelson geometry based on the spontaneous parametric down-conversion in a second-order nonlinear crystal is studied systematically. A simplified theoretical model of the QNI is presented. The interference visibility, coherence length, equal-inclination interference, and equal-thickness interference for the QNI are demonstrated theoretically and experimentally. As an application example of the QNI, the refractive index and the angle between two surfaces of a BBO crystal are measured using equal-inclination interference and equal-thickness interference.
In this note we deal with a new observer for nonlinear systems of dimension n in canonical observability form. We follow the standard high-gain paradigm, but instead of having an observer of dimension n with a gain that grows up to power n, we design an observer of dimension 2n-2 with a gain that grows up only to power 2.