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arXiv:1406.1232

Two-Photon Interference and Entanglement in Coupled Cavities

Imran M. Mirza, S. J. van Enk

Published Jun 4, 2014• 0 citations
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Abstract

Two-photon interference effects, such as the Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) effect, can be used to characterize to what extent two photons are identical. Identical photons are necessary for both linear optics quantum computing and single-photon quantum cryptography. We study here how storage and delay of photons in coupled cavity arrays, which inevitably will lead to changes in the photons' spectral and temporal profiles, affects their HOM interference. In addition we consider various types of entanglement that occur naturally in such a context.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.1406.1232

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Two-photon interference effects, such as the Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) effect, can be used to characterize to what extent two photons are identical. Identical photons are necessary for both linear optics quantum computing and single-photon quantum cryptography. We study here how storage and delay of photons in coupled cavity arrays, which inevitably will lead to changes in the photons' spectral and temporal profiles, affects their HOM interference. In addition we consider various types of entanglement that occur naturally in such a context.
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The Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) effect, an effective two-photon interference phenomenon, is a cornerstone of quantum optics and a key tool for linear optical quantum information processing. While the HOM effect has been extensively studied both theoretically and experimentally for various photonic quantum states, particularly in the spectral domain, detailed overviews of its behaviour for structured photons - those with complex spatial profiles - under arbitrary spatial mode measurement schemes are still lacking. This tutorial aims to fill this gap by providing a comprehensive theoretical analysis of the HOM effect for structured photons, including an arbitrary mode projection on quantum interference outcomes. The tutorial also provides analytical, closed-form expressions of the HOM visibility under different measurement conditions.
We present a quantum jump/trajectory analysis of the two-photon interference phenomenon in the context of the Hong–Ou–Mandel (HOM) effect. In particular, we consider the standard setup of the HOM effect, which consists of two-photon sources firing single photons from opposite sides of a 50/50 beam splitter and two perfect detectors placed at the output ports to record photodetection events. For single-photon sources, we consider two special cases: (1) two excited two-level atoms and (2) two atom–cavity setups with initially present single photons in both cavities. For both cases, we report analytic results as well as quantum jump-based Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate the signatures of these single-photon sources on the HOM effect under different working conditions (e.g., strong- and weak-coupling regimes of cavity quantum electrodynamics). The HOM effect offers applications in the areas of linear optics quantum computing, as well as in protocols that test the indistinguishability of single-photon sources.
Two-photon interference effects arise because photons are indistinguishable particles. In the wellknown Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) effect, the transmission of two photons at a beam splitter interferes destructively with the reflection of both photons, requiring both photons to "bunch up" by leaving the beam splitter on the same side. Here, we show that the interference between locally propagating photons and photons exchanged by a mode swap can be implemented by post-selecting spatially separated photon outputs of a four-path interferometer. Even though the photons detected at spatially separated locations must have travelled along paths that never met up at the same beam splitter, the Hong-Ou-Mandel effect can be observed in correlations between the output ports that originate from the association of detection events with non-local output modes defined by the two single photon inputs. Local phase shifts can be used to map out non-classical correlations between the photons detected at different output locations, clarifying the role of linear optics in generating entanglement between spatially separated photons. Our work thus establishes a fundamental relation between multiphoton interference and entanglement, opening the door to new possibilities in optical quantum technologies.
An understanding of the phenomenon of light interference forms the kernel underlying the discovery of the nature of light from the viewpoints of both classical physics and quantum physics. Here we report on two-photon interference with temporally separated continuous-wave coherent photons by using a temporal post-selection method with an arbitrary time delay. Although the temporal separation of a day between the photons is considerably longer than the coherence time of the light source, we observe the Hong–Ou–Mandel (HOM) interference of the pairwise two-photon state. Furthermore, we experimentally demonstrate the HOM interference observed in one of the interferometer-output modes by using only one single-photon detector for a large temporal separation.