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arXiv:1805.12408

Single photon wavefront characterization by optical mixing

Shlomo Ruschin

Published May 31, 2018• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Optical mixing experiments show the ability of amplifying a weak optical signal by superposing it with a stronger one. This principle has been demonstrated also for weak signals at the quantum level, down to a single photon. In the present communication it is suggested that the sensitivity of optical mixing between a strong macroscopic source and a single photon can be further enhanced as to allow the sensing the wavefront of the photon's mode simultaneously at two or more locations. Key conditions for that detection is reducing the active size of the detectors below the typical size of the transverse modes, and performing an optical intensity correlation measurement of the Hanbury Brown and Twiss type. Due to the inherent amplification effect of the mixing process, a macroscopic signal is extracted, out of which the photon wave-front characterization at more than one location is achievable with good fidelity even for a single photon emission event. A basic scheme is proposed for the demonstration of the effect, which is analyzed based on a simple quantum model. The validity of the model is confirmed by comparison with previous theoretical and experimental reports involving single photon sources.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.1805.12408

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Optical mixing experiments show the ability of amplifying a weak optical signal by superposing it with a stronger one. This principle has been demonstrated also for weak signals at the quantum level, down to a single photon. In the present communication it is suggested that the sensitivity of optical mixing between a strong macroscopic source and a single photon can be further enhanced as to allow the sensing the wavefront of the photon's mode simultaneously at two or more locations. Key conditions for that detection is reducing the active size of the detectors below the typical size of the transverse modes, and performing an optical intensity correlation measurement of the Hanbury Brown and Twiss type. Due to the inherent amplification effect of the mixing process, a macroscopic signal is extracted, out of which the photon wave-front characterization at more than one location is achievable with good fidelity even for a single photon emission event. A basic scheme is proposed for the demonstration of the effect, which is analyzed based on a simple quantum model. The validity of the model is confirmed by comparison with previous theoretical and experimental reports involving single photon sources.
The direct measurement of the Mandel parameter of weak laser pulses, with 10 ns pulse duration time and the mean number of photon per pulse nˉ\bar nnˉ being approximately 0.1, is investigated by recording every photocount event. With the Hanbury Brown and Twiss detection scheme, and not more than one photon per pulse being detected during the sample time by single-photon counters, we have found that the single mode diode laser with driving current lower than the threshold yields a sub-Poissonian statistics. In addition, when the diode laser driving current is much higher than the threshold, it is validated that the Mandel parameterQ C of the Poissonian coherent state is nearly −nˉ/2 - \bar n/2−nˉ/2 . The experimental results are in good agreement with theoretical prediction considering the measurement error.
I present experimental and theoretical work on extending nonlinear optical effects to the quantum domain. First, I experimentally demonstrate an incoherent nonlinear effect linked to the amplification stage of photon detection in a single-photon counter. The detector, in the high-efficiency regime, does not follow Glauber's quantum mechanical model for photodetection and, as a result, quantum interference effects are observable in the singles rate of one detector. I then go on to theoretically describe and experimentally demonstrate two coherent nonlinear optical effects at the single-photon level. In both experiments, the usually weak nonlinear optical properties of a common nonlinear crystal are enhanced by over 10 orders of magnitude using interference. The first of these coherent processes uses interference to frequency double all photon pairs from a couple of very weak laser beams (containing, on average, less than one photon per pulse). I show how this nonlinearity might be used for �phase-sum� entanglement swapping and an experimental demonstration of Hardy's paradox. The second coherent effect is the dispersive analogue to the first; instead of frequency doubling all of the photon pairs, all photon pairs experience an additional nonlinear phase shift. It is analogous to an immensely enhanced Kerr nonlinearity. This effect is applied to the problem of Bell-state discrimination and can be used to entangle and disentangle the polarization states of a pair of photons under certain conditions. The final experiment in this thesis is a demonstration of a technique for creating coherent superpositions of zero and one photon based on the detection of a single, �trigger� photon.
Emitters of single photons are essential resources for emerging quantum technologies and developed within different platforms including nonlinear optics and atomic and solid-state systems. The energy-level structures of emission processes are critical for reaching and controlling high-quality sources. The most commonly applied test uses a Hanbury Brown and Twiss (HBT) setup to determine the emitter energy-level structure based on fitting temporal correlations of photon detection events. However, only partial information about the emission process is extracted from such detection, that might be followed by an inconclusive fitting of the data. This process predetermines our limited ability to quantify and understand the dynamics in the photon emission process that are of importance for the applications in communication, sensing, and computing. In this work, we present a complete analysis based on all normalized coincidences between detection and no-detection events recorded in the same HBT setup to certify expected properties of an emitted photonic state. As a proof of concept we apply our methodology to single nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond, in which case the certification conclusively rejects a model based on a two-level emitter that radiates a photonic state mixed with any classical noise background. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
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Abstract The Hanbury Brown and Twiss (HBT) interferometer was proposed to observe intensity correlations of starlight to measure a star’s angular diameter. As the intensity of light that reaches the detector from a star is very weak, one cannot usually get a workable signal-to-noise ratio. We propose an improved HBT interferometric scheme incorporating optical parametric amplifiers (OPA) into the system to amplify the correlation signal. Remarkably, for weak star light, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in the new HBT interferometric scheme is much better than that of conventional HBT interferometer. Our work is valuable in measuring a star whose intensity at the detector is low and maybe also applicable in remote sensing and long-distance quantum imaging where the light passed through the object is weak after a long distance transmission.
The measurement of the correlation between two quantum systems or particles has a broad significance in physics and also plays a central role in the fields of quantum optics and quantum information science. We propose a method of measuring the correlation between the transverse momenta of two photons, in which one only needs to detect one of the photons. We show that it is possible to generate a single-photon fringe pattern by using two spatially separated identical biphoton sources. The fringes are similar to the ones observed in a Michelson interferometer and possess certain remarkable properties. A striking feature of the fringes is that although the pattern is obtained by detecting one photon only of each photon pair, the fringes shift due to a change in the optical path traversed by the undetected photon; the shift is characterized by a combination of wavelengths of both photons. Using this method one can, therefore, measure the wavelength of a photon without detecting it. The visibility of the fringes diminishes as the correlation between the transverse momenta of twin photons decreases: visibility is unity for maximum momentum correlation and zero for no momentum correlation. This dependence allows us to determine the momentum correlation between both photons from the visibility of the fringe pattern obtained by detecting one of the photons only. Our method can potentially be generalized to other quantum entities.