We show that broadband biphoton wavepackets produced via Spontaneous Parametric Down-Conversion (SPDC) in crystals with linearly aperiodic poling can be easily compressed in time using the effect of group-velocity dispersion in optical fibres. This result could foster important developments in quantum metrology and lithography.
We present the first observation of two-photon polarization interference structure in the second-order Glaubers correlation function of two-photon light generated via type-II spontaneous parametric down-conversion. In order to obtain this result, two
-photon light is transmitted through an optical fibre and the coincidence distribution is analyzed by means of the START-STOP method. Beyond the experimental demonstration of an interesting effect in quantum optics, these results also have considerable relevance for quantum communications.
We study the theory of linearly chirped biphoton wave-packets produced in two basic quasi-phase-matching configurations: chirped photonic-like crystals and aperiodically poled crystals. The novelty is that these structures are considered as definite
assembles of nonlinear layers that leads to detailed description of spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) processes through the discrete Gauss sums. We demonstrate that biphoton spectra for chirped photonic crystals involving a small number of layers consist from definite well-resolved spectral lines. We also discuss the forming of broadband spectra of signal (idler) waves in SPDC for both configurations as number of layers increases as well as in dependence of chirping parameters .
We propose and examine the use of biphoton pairs, such as those created in parametric down conversion or four-wave mixing, to enhance the precision and the resolution of measuring optical displacements by position-sensitive detection. We show that th
e precision of measuring a small optical beam displacement with this method can be significantly enhanced by the correlation between the two photons, given the same optical mode. The improvement is largest if the correlations between the photons are strong, and falls off as the biphoton correlation weakens. More surprisingly, we find that the smallest resolvable parameter of a simple split detector scales as the inverse of the number of biphotons for small biphoton number (Heisenberg scaling), because the Fisher information diverges as the parameter to be estimated decreases in value. One usually sees this scaling only for systems with many entangled degrees of freedom. We discuss the transition for the split-detection scheme to the standard quantum limit scaling for imperfect correlations as the biphoton number is increased. An analysis of an $N$-pixel detector is also given to investigate the benefit of using a higher resolution detector. The physical limit of these metrology schemes is determined by the uncertainty in the birth zone of the biphoton in the nonlinear crystal.
We test two-dimensional TPSA of biphoton light emitted via ultrafast spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) using the effect of group-velocity dispersion in optical fibres. Further, we apply this technique to demonstrate the engineering of bip
hoton spectral properties by acting on the pump pulse shape.
The optical fibre is an essential tool for our communication infrastructure since it is the main transmission channel for optical communications. The latest major advance in optical fibre technology is spatial division multiplexing (SDM), where new f
ibre designs and components establish multiple co-existing data channels based on light propagation over distinct transverse optical modes. Simultaneously, there have been many recent developments in the field of quantum information processing (QIP), with novel protocols and devices in areas such as computing, communication and metrology. Here, we review recent works implementing QIP protocols with SDM optical fibres, and discuss new possibilities for manipulating quantum systems based on this technology.