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arXiv:1210.4575 · New Journal of Physics

Macroscopic Hong–Ou–Mandel interference

T. Sh. Iskhakov, Kirill Yu. Spasibko, Maria V. Chekhova, Gerd Leuchs

Published Sep 24, 2013• 23 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We report on a Hong–Ou–Mandel interference experiment for twin beams with photon numbers per mode as large as 10 6 generated via high-gain parametric down conversion (PDC). The standard technique of coincidence counting leads in this case to a dip with a very low visibility. By measuring, instead of coincidence counting rate, the variance of the photon-number difference, we observe an extremely well-pronounced peak. From the shape of the peak, one can infer information about the spectral properties of the PDC radiation, including the number of frequency/temporal modes.

DOI
10.1088/1367-2630/15/9/093036

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We report on a Hong–Ou–Mandel interference experiment for twin beams with photon numbers per mode as large as 10 6 generated via high-gain parametric down conversion (PDC). The standard technique of coincidence counting leads in this case to a dip with a very low visibility. By measuring, instead of coincidence counting rate, the variance of the photon-number difference, we observe an extremely well-pronounced peak. From the shape of the peak, one can infer information about the spectral properties of the PDC radiation, including the number of frequency/temporal modes.
Parametric down-conversion (PDC) is mostly known in the low-gain (spontaneous) regime, in which the correlated photon pairs are produced. Spontaneous PDC (SPDC) plays a very important role for quantum optics as a variety of quantum states is produced via SPDC. In the high-gain case PDC leads to generation of bright states having up to hundreds mW mean power. With such states almost any nonlinear optical interaction or light-matter interaction becomes more efficient. Even being macroscopically bright, the produced states maintain nonclassical properties as, for example, the fluctuations of electric field quadratures are squeezed below the shot-noise level. The high-gain PDC could be used not only in the same applications as SPDC, it also can provide new ones. Apart from that the high-gain PDC has many remarkable spectral and statistical properties, which are in the focus of this work. The description starts from the PDC generation in normal and anomalous group velocity dispersion ranges. The spectrum and mode content of high-gain PDC is considered as well as their change with the parametric gain are demonstrated. Then, there are the interference effects emerging from the PDC correlations presented, namely the macroscopic analogue of the Hong-Ou-Mandel interference. In addition, it is shown how spatial and temporal walk-off matching could be used for the generation of giant narrowband twin beams. Finally, the statistical properties of high-gain PDC are reviewed as well as their use for multiphoton effects is demonstrated. Photon-number fluctuations of PDC are studied via normalized correlation functions and probability distributions. These fluctuations enhance the generation efficiency for multiphoton effects by orders of magnitude and lead to tremendously fluctuating light described by heavy-tailed photon-number probability distributions.
We study the Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometer in the regime of spontaneous parametric down-conversion with high pump beam power at the crystal. In this regime one and two photons from a pump pulsed laser beam generate one and two pairs of photons, respectively. These photons are then directed to the beam splitter of the interferometer and detected at its exit in coincidence. An interesting phenomenon is observed: The reduction of the visibility of the Hong-Ou-Mandel coincidence peak (or dip) with the increase of pump power. We study the relation between the visibility of the fourth-order interference pattern and the power of the pumping laser beam for type I and type II phase-matching crystals. Our theoretical calculations are in good agreement with the experimental results.
A high visibility Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference between two independently prepared photons plays an important role in various photonic quantum information processing. In a standard HOM experiment using photons generated by pulse-pumped spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC), larger detection time windows than the coherence time of photons have been employed for measuring the HOM visibility and/or drawing the HOM dip. If large amounts of stray photons continuously exist within the detection time windows, employing small detection time windows is favorable for reducing the effect of background noises. Especially, such a setup is helpful for the HOM experiment using continuous wave (cw)-pumped SPDC and the time-resolved coincidence measurement. Here we argue that the method for determining the HOM visibility used in the previous cw experiments tends to suffer from distortion arising from biased contribution of the background noises. We then present a new method with unbiased treatment of the cw backgrounds. By using this method, we experimentally demonstrate a high visibility HOM interference of two heralded telecom photons independently generated by SPDC with employing cw pump light. An observed HOM visibility is 0.87 ± 0.04, which is as high as those observed by using pulse-pumped SPDC photons.
Abstract The Hong–Ou–Mandel (HOM) interference is one of the most intriguing quantum optical phenomena and crucial in performing quantum optical communication and computation tasks. Lately, twin beam emitters such as those relying on the process of parametric down-conversion (PDC) have become confident sources of heralded single photons. However, if the pump power is high enough, the pairs produced via PDC—often called signal and idler—incorporate multiphoton contributions that usually distort the investigated quantum features. Here, we derive the temporal characteristics of the HOM interference between heralded states from two independent narrowband PDC sources. Apart from the PDC multiphoton content, our treatment also takes into account effects arriving from an unbalanced beam splitter ratio and optical losses. We perform a simulation in the telecommunication wavelength range and provide a useful tool for finding the optimal choice for PDC process parameters. Our results offer insight in the properties of narrowband PDC sources and turn useful when driving quantum optical applications with them.
We present an efficient tool capable of measuring the spectral correlations between photons emerging from a Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometer. We show that for our spectrally factorizable spontaneous down-conversion source, the Hong-Ou-Mandel interference visibility decreases as the photons' frequency spread is increased to a maximum of 165 nm. Unfiltered, we obtained a visibility of 92.092.0%\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.2%.92.0 The maximum visibility was 9797%\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.2%97 after applying filtering. We show that the tool can be useful for the study of spectral correlations that impair high-visibility and high-fidelity multisource interference applications. The nature of this tool also allows for arbitrary post-selective spectral filtering and high-rate multiphoton spectral correlation measurements.
Among the whole experiments using entangled pairs of photons, the famous experiment of two-photon interference known now as Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference, is probably one of the most fascinating. This ground-breaking experiment paved the way for a multitude of experiments showing the richness of the quantum properties of Spontaneous Parametric Down conversion (SPDC) and their applications to original communication protocols. Most of them use the coherence time property of a bi-photon state and measurement are mainly performed with bucket detectors and coincidence counters. While some studies report the spatial coherence of two-photon state, measurements are always performed in the temporal domain.