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arXiv:1810.07552 · Optics Letters

Mode-selective image upconversion

Santosh Kumar, He Zhang, Stephanie Maruca, Yu-Ping Huang

Published Dec 19, 2018• 25 citations
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Abstract

We study selective upconversion of optical signals according to their detailed transverse electromagnetic modes and demonstrate its proof of operation in a nonlinear crystal. The mode selectivity is achieved by preparing the pump wave in an optimized spatial profile to drive the upconversion. For signals in the Laguerre-Gaussian modes, we show that a mode can be converted with up to 60 times higher efficiency than an overlapping, but orthogonal, mode. This nonlinear optical approach may find applications in compressive imaging, pattern recognition, quantum communications, and others, where the existing linear optical methods are limited.

DOI
10.1364/ol.44.000098

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We study selective upconversion of optical signals according to their detailed transverse electromagnetic modes and demonstrate its proof of operation in a nonlinear crystal. The mode selectivity is achieved by preparing the pump wave in an optimized spatial profile to drive the upconversion. For signals in the Laguerre-Gaussian modes, we show that a mode can be converted with up to 60 times higher efficiency than an overlapping, but orthogonal, mode. This nonlinear optical approach may find applications in compressive imaging, pattern recognition, quantum communications, and others, where the existing linear optical methods are limited.
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We experimentally demonstrate a programmable parametric mode sorter of high-dimensional signals in a composite spatiotemporal Hilbert space through mode-selective quantum frequency up-conversion. As a concrete example and with quantum communication applications in mind, we consider the Laguerre-Gaussian and Hermite-Gaussian modes as the spatial and temporal state basis for the signals, respectively. By modulating the spatiotemporal profiles of the up-conversion pump, we demonstrate the faithful selection of single photons in those modes and their superposition modes. Our results show an improvement in the quantum mode-sorting performance by coupling the up-converted light into a single-mode fiber and/or operating the upconversion at the edge of phase matching. By optimizing pump temporal profiles only, we achieve more than 12 dB extinction for mutually unbiased basis (MUB) sets of the spatiotemporal modes. This fully programmable and efficient system could serve as a viable resource for quantum communications, quantum computation, and quantum metrology.
We investigate spatial-mode-selective frequency up-converters of quantum states from infrared to visible region, which could be useful not only for interfacing the optical fiber links with quantum memories and for increasing the photon detection efficiency, but also for classical demultiplexing of spatial modes that are otherwise difficult to discriminate in both spatial and spatial-frequency domains. We consider two approaches: first, based on sum-frequency generation (SFG) in 2D free space, and second, based on SFG in a multimode waveguide with 2D confinement. For the latter approach, we find that under proper quasi-phase-matching arrangement, several different pairs of signal and pump modes are converted to the same SFG mode. By adjusting the relative phases and magnitudes of the pump modes, any superposition of the corresponding signal modes can be selected for up-conversion without affecting other modes.