We show how the entangled photons produced in parametric down conversion can be used to improve the sensitivity of a Sagnac interferometer. Two-photon and four-photon coincidences increases the sensitivity by a factor of two and four respectively. Our results apply to sources with arbitrary pumping and squeezing parameters.
Recent theoretical and experimental papers have shown how one can achieve Heisenberg-limited measurements by using entangled photons. Here we show how the photons in a noncollinear down-conversion process can be used for improving the sensitivity of magneto-optical rotation by a factor of 4 which takes us towards the Heisenberg limit. Our results apply to sources with arbitrary pumping. We also present several generalizations of earlier results for the collinear geometry. The sensitivity depends on whether the two-photon or four-photon coincidence detection is used.
This dissertation contains new theoretical work on how to utilize the entangled photons produced in a parametric down conversion to improve resolution and sensitivity in quantum interferometry, magnetometry and lithography. Chapter 1 introduces some basics of quantum imaging and sensing systems and gives an outline of the thesis. Chapter 2 deals with the use of entangled photons in Sagnac interferometry. We introduce the Sagnac ring interferometer and analyze the Sagnac phase shift with classical and quantum inputs of light. We compare the results obtained from entangled photon pairs input with classical and single-photon inputs. We show how the photon-photon correlation measurements increase the resolution and the sensitivity in the phase shift. In chapter three, we present an analysis of how parametric down-converted photons could be utilized in getting better spectroscopic information about a medium which has magnetic field induced anisotropy. We demonstrate how the improvement in magneto-optical rotation (MOR) of light could be realized by employing two different schemes with collinear and noncollinear down-conversion geometries compared to the use of coherent light. We calculate the resolution that can be achieved in the MOR's both by the use of coherent light and down-converted light. We discuss the possibility that the Heisenberg limit could be reached in magnetometry by the use of down-converted light. In chapter 4, we propose a new idea of using coherent beam stimulated parametric processes along with spontaneous ones to produce resolution improvement in two-photon interferometry. The stimulated processes enhance the count rate by several orders of magnitude while at the same time maintaining high visibility at large gains of the parametric process. We further find that the phases of coherent fields can also be used as tuning knobs to control the visibility of the pattern. We use coherent beams at the signal and idler frequencies as the seed light for the down-conversion process. In chapter 5, we analyze the minimum phase uncertainty of the phase measurement in a Mach-Zehnder interferometer using stimulated parametric down-conversion. We calculate the phase sensitivities for different measurement schemes. We conclude the thesis in chapter 6 and give an outlook for future work.
This thesis describes the design, development, and implementation of a pulsed source of polarization-entangled photons using spontaneous parametric down-conversion in a Sagnac interferometer. A tangle of 0.9286 ± 0.0015, fidelity to the state (|10〉 + |01〉)/√2 of \n0.9798 ± 0.0004 and a brightness of 597 pairs/s/mW were demonstrated. \n \nSpontaneous parametric down-conversion is a nonlinear optical process in which one photon is split into two lower-frequency photons while conserving momentum and energy, in this \nexperiment nearly degenerate photons are produced. These photons are then interfered at the output beamsplitter of the interferometer, exchanging path entanglement for polarization entanglement and generating the desired polarization-entangled photon pairs.
Abstract Quantum phenomena such as entanglement can improve fundamental limits on the sensitivity of a measurement probe. In optical interferometry, a probe consisting of N entangled photons provides up to a N N enhancement in phase sensitivity compared to a classical probe of the same energy. Here, we employ high-gain parametric down-conversion sources and photon-number-resolving detectors to perform interferometry with heralded quantum probes of sizes up to N = 8 (i.e. measuring up to 16-photon coincidences). Our probes are created by injecting heralded photon-number states into an interferometer, and in principle provide quantum-enhanced phase sensitivity even in the presence of significant optical loss. Our work paves the way toward quantum-enhanced interferometry using large entangled photonic states.
Non-classical states of light are of fundamental importance for emerging quantum technologies. All optics experiments producing multi-qubit entangled states have until now relied on outcome post-selection, a procedure where only the measurement results corresponding to the desired state are considered. This method severely limits the usefulness of the resulting entangled states. fiere, we show the direct production of polarization- entangled photon triplets by cascading two entangled down-conversion processes[1]. First, a Sagnac source [2] produces non-degenerate entangled photon pairs at 776 nm and 842 nm in a Bell state. The 776 nm photon is sent through a polarizing Mach-Zehnder interferometer with a down-conversion crystal in each arm. If it is down-converted, a photon pair is created in modes 2 and 3 with a polarization state depending on the pump photon. The quantum stete describing the photon triplets is: