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arXiv:1312.7754 · Journal of Physics B Atomic Molecular and Optical Physics

Single-photon Sagnac interferometer

Guillaume Bertocchi, Olivier Alibart, Daniel B. Ostrowsky, Sébastien Tanzilli, Pascal A. Baldi

Published Feb 6, 2006• 55 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We present the first experimental demonstration of the optical Sagnac effect at the single-photon level. Using a high quality guided-wave heralded single-photon source at 1550 nm and a fibre optics setup, we obtain an interference pattern with net visibilities up to (99.2 ± 0.4%). On the basis of this high visibility and the compactness of the setup, the interest of such a system for fibre optics gyroscope is discussed.

DOI
10.1088/0953-4075/39/5/001

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We present the first experimental demonstration of the optical Sagnac effect at the single-photon level. Using a high quality guided-wave heralded single-photon source at 1550 nm and a fibre optics setup, we obtain an interference pattern with net visibilities up to (99.2 ± 0.4%). On the basis of this high visibility and the compactness of the setup, the interest of such a system for fibre optics gyroscope is discussed.
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In the field of quantum optics and its wide variety of applications it is essential to have high brightness sources of entangled photons. In this Bachelor project, the aim has been to produce such a source based on recent experimental setups [1] [2] with a so-called Sagnac interferometer to generate polarization-entangled photons. The source built shows high quality entanglement. High visibility polarisation coincidence fringes (99.5% visibility) were observed. Moreover a Bell’s inequality [6] in a CHSH-form[36] was violated by more than 44 standard deviations. Also the wavelength tuning of the source with respect to temperature and pump wavelength was analysed, revealing shifts in the degeneracy temperature of 0.020 nm/K and a shift of the signal and idler wavelengths of 0.046 nm/K. This thesis begins with an introduction which reviews the fundamental ideas of entanglement and it’s role in quantum mechanics in section 1. This section is continued by a general discussion of photonic entanglement, different types of photonic entanglement and a short discussion of how to measure this entanglement is presented. This is followed by a review of different tecniques of generating entangled photons in sections 2 and 3. In section 4, the experimental process of assembling the Sagnac interferometer is presented. This is followed by a review of experimental results, which includes a characterisation of the source in relation to temperature and pump wavelength tunability in section 5. Then, in section 6, a presentation and an experimental test of Bell’s inequalities are presented. Thereafter, concluding remarks are made regarding the outcome of this project and the potential of further investigations utilizing the source in sections 7 and 8.
We introduce a stable, long-distance single- photon Sagnac interferometer, which has a balanced configuration to efficiently compensate phase drift caused by change of the fiber-optic path. By using time-division phase modulation, single-photon interference was realized at 1550 nm in a 5-km-long as well as 27-km-long Sagnac fiber loops, with a fringe visibility higher than 90% and long-term stability. The stable performance of the single-photon interference indicated that the time-division phase-modulated Sag- nac interferometer might readily lead to practical applications in single-photon routing and quantum cryptography.
Abstract We designed and implemented a novel combination of a Sagnac-interferometer with a Mach–Zehnder interferometer for a source of polarization-entangled photons. The new versatile configuration does not require multi-wavelength polarization optics, yet it performs with a good polarization quality and phase-stability over a wide wavelength range. We demonstrate the interferometer using only standard commercial optics to experimentally realize the pulsed generation of polarization-entangled photon-pairs at wavelengths of 764 nm and 1221 nm via type-I spontaneous four-wave mixing in a polarization-maintaining fiber. Polarization entanglement was verified by a polarization-correlation measurement with a visibility of 95.5% from raw coincidence counts and the violation of the Clauser–Horne–Shimony–Holt (CHSH) inequality with S = 2.70 ± 0.04. The long-term phase-stability was characterized by an Allan deviation of 8° over an integration time of about 1 h with no active phase-stabilization.