No Arabic abstract
Generation of two-photon wavepackets, produced by spontaneous parametric down conversion in crystals with linearly chirped quasi-phase matching grating, is analyzed. Although being spectrally broad, two-photon wavepackets produced this way are not Fourier transform limited. In the paper we discuss the temporal compression of the wavepackets, exploiting the insertion of a standard optical fiber in the path of one of the two photons. The effect is analyzed by means of full numerical calculation and the exact dispersion dependencies in both the crystal and the fiber are considered. The study opens the way to the practical realization of this idea.
The cascaded biphoton state generated from a cold atomic ensemble presents one of the strongly correlated resources that can preserve and relay quantum information. Under the four-wave mixing condition, the emitted signal and idler photons from the upper and lower excited states become highly correlated in their traveling directions and entangled in continuous frequency spaces. In this system, we theoretically study the spectral compression of the biphoton source using an external cavity and show the reduction in its frequency entanglement entropy. This indicates, respectively, an improved light absorption efficiency for the idler photon as well as an almost pure biphoton source which is useful in optical quantum networks. We further investigate the limit of the spectral compression that can be achieved by using multiple cavities. Our results show the capability and potential of the biphoton source with external cavities, where the performance of atom-based quantum memory can be enhanced and the entanglement property can be manipulated by tailoring the spectral compression.
Tunable biphotons are highly important for a wide range of quantum applications. For some applications, especially interesting are cases where two photons of a pair are far apart in frequency. Here, we report a tunable biphoton source based on a xenon-filled hollow-core photonic crystal fiber. Tunability is achieved by adjusting the pressure of the gas inside the fiber. This allows us to tailor the dispersion landscape of the fiber, overcoming the principal limitations of solid-core fiber-based biphoton sources. We report a maximum tunability of 120 THz for a pressure range of 4 bar with a continuous shift of 30 THz/bar. At 21 bar, the photons of a pair are separated by more than one octave. Despite the large separation, both photons have large bandwidths. At 17 bar, they form a very broad (110 THz) band around the frequency of the pump.
We present experimental evidence of the universal emergence of the Peregrine soliton predicted in the semi-classical (zero-dispersion) limit of the focusing nonlinear Schr{o}dinger equation [Comm. Pure Appl. Math. {bf 66}, 678 (2012)]. Experiments studying higher-order soliton propagation in optical fiber use an optical sampling oscilloscope and frequency-resolved optical gating to characterise intensity and phase around the first point of soliton compression and the results show that the properties of the compressed pulse and background pedestal can be interpreted in terms of the Peregrine soliton. Experimental and numerical results reveal that the universal mechanism under study is highly robust and can be observed over a broad range of parameters, and experiments are in very good agreement with numerical simulations.
We present a quantum-theoretical treatment of biphoton generation in single-resonant type-II parametric down-conversion. The nonlinear medium is continuously pumped and is placed inside a cavity which is resonant for the signal field, but nonresonant for the idler deflected by an intra-cavity polarizing beam splitter. The intensity of the classical pump is assumed to be sufficiently low in order to yield a biphoton production rate that is small compared to the cavity loss rate. Explicit expressions are derived for the rate of biphoton generation and for the biphoton wave function. The output spectra of the signal and idler field are determined, as well as the second-order signal-idler cross-correlation function which is shown to be asymmetric with respect to the time delay. Due to frequency entanglement in the signal-idler photon pair, the idler spectrum is found to reveal the longitudinal mode structure of the cavity, even though the idler field is not resonant.
We numerically investigate topological phases of periodic lattice systems in tight-binding description under the influence of dissipation. The effects of dissipation are effectively described by $mathcal{PT}$-symmetric potentials. In this framework we develop a general numerical gauge smoothing procedure to calculate complex Berry phases from the biorthogonal basis of the systems non-Hermitian Hamiltonian. Further, we apply this method to a one-dimensional $mathcal{PT}$-symmetric lattice system and verify our numerical results by an analytical calculation.