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arXiv:1710.04665 · Journal of the Optical Society of America B

Detection of squeezed light with glass-integrated technology embedded into a homodyne detector setup

Carmen Porto, Davide Rusca, S. Cialdi, Andrea Crespi, Roberto Osellame, Dario Tamascelli, Stefano Olivares, Matteo G. A. Paris

Published Jun 14, 2018• 18 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We design and demonstrate a homodyne detection scheme based on a glass-integrated optical device (GID) operating in the quantum regime, that is, able to detect genuine nonclassical features. Our device is entirely fabricated by femtosecond laser micromachining. The GID incorporates on the same chip a balanced waveguide beamsplitter and a thermo-optic phase shifter, allowing us to record homodyne traces at different phases and to perform reliable quantum state tomography. In particular, we show that the GID allows for the detection of nonclassical features of continuous-variable quantum states, such as squeezed states.

DOI
10.1364/josab.35.001596

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We design and demonstrate a homodyne detection scheme based on a glass-integrated optical device (GID) operating in the quantum regime, that is, able to detect genuine nonclassical features. Our device is entirely fabricated by femtosecond laser micromachining. The GID incorporates on the same chip a balanced waveguide beamsplitter and a thermo-optic phase shifter, allowing us to record homodyne traces at different phases and to perform reliable quantum state tomography. In particular, we show that the GID allows for the detection of nonclassical features of continuous-variable quantum states, such as squeezed states.
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We demonstrate a squeezing experiment exploiting the association of integrated optics and telecom technology as key features for compact, stable, and practical continuous variable quantum optics. In our setup, squeezed light is generated by single pass spontaneous parametric down conversion on a lithium niobate photonic circuit and detected by an homodyne detector whose interferometric part is directly integrated on the same platform. The remaining parts of the experiment are implemented using commercial plug-and-play devices based on guided-wave technologies. We measure, for a CW pump power of 40\,mW, a squeezing level of −2.00±0.05-2.00\pm0.05−2.00±0.05\,dB, (antisqueezing +2.80±0.05+2.80\pm0.05+2.80±0.05\,dB) thus confirming the validity of our approach and opening the way toward miniaturized and easy-to-handle continuous variable based quantum systems.
Squeezed light underpins quantum-enhanced sensing and continuous-variable quantum information processing, and integrated photonics offers a route to producing it at scale. Universal to these applications are squeezed-light generation and measurement. Importantly, quantum measurements serve not only as readout but also as active operations in quantum-state evolution. However, integrating squeezed-light generation and photodetection on the same photonic chip has remained challenging because they impose fundamentally conflicting material requirements: low optical loss to preserve quantum correlations, but efficient photon absorption for photodetection. Here, we demonstrate squeezed-light generation, routing, and balanced homodyne detection integrated on a single photonic chip through heterogeneous integration. A two-mode squeezed quantum microcomb comprising 34 quantum modes is measured with approximately 3 dB squeezing. Our work establishes a scalable architecture for fully integrated squeezed-light quantum photonic systems, unifying quantum-state generation, processing, and detection on a single chip.
Optical homodyne detection has found use as a characterisation tool in a range of quantum technologies. So far implementations have been limited to bulk optics. Here we present the optical integration of a homodyne detector onto a silicon photonics chip. The resulting device operates at high speed, up 150 MHz, it is compact and it operates with low noise, quantified with 11 dB clearance between shot noise and electronic noise. We perform on-chip quantum tomography of coherent states with the detector and show that it meets the requirements for characterising more general quantum states of light. We also show that the detector is able to produce quantum random numbers at a rate of 1.2 Gbps, by measuring the vacuum state of the electromagnetic field and applying off-line post processing. The produced random numbers pass all the statistical tests provided by the NIST test suite.
The ability to generate and detect quantum states of light on a single integrated photonic device is essential to scale quantum photonics into useful quantum technologies. Integrating the required capabilities into complementary-metal-oxide-semiconductor compatible monolithic chips can reduce cost and unlock new functionality through miniaturisation. In this work we demonstrate a single silicon-on-insulator photonic integrated circuit for the monolithic generation and detection of quantum light on a commercially available platform that operates entirely at room temperature. Specifically, we leverage spontaneous four-wave mixing in silicon waveguides to produce squeezed light which is subsequently detected by photodiodes operating in a pulsed homodyne detector configuration on the same chip as the source. We directly measure 0.25(1)0.25(1)0.25(1) dB of squeezing, including contributions from waveguide propagation loss and detection inefficiency, and include a detailed analysis of the impact of nonlinear loss on the squeezing levels achievable using this platform.