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arXiv:1811.07646 · Physical Review A

Quantum state engineering by nonlinear quantum interference

Liang Cui, Jie Su, Jiamin Li, Yuhong Liu, Xiaoying Li, Z. Y. Ou

Published Sep 18, 2020• 33 citations
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Abstract

The success of many protocols in optical quantum information processing relies on the availability of photon states with a well-defined spatial and temporal mode, but the latter is often difficult to engineer. The authors present a new approach based on nonlinear interferometry that separates the nonlinear gain control from the dispersion engineering, resulting in photon pairs simultaneously possessing the advantages of high purity, high collection efficiency, high brightness, and flexibility in wavelength and bandwidth selection.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.102.033718

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The success of many protocols in optical quantum information processing relies on the availability of photon states with a well-defined spatial and temporal mode, but the latter is often difficult to engineer. The authors present a new approach based on nonlinear interferometry that separates the nonlinear gain control from the dispersion engineering, resulting in photon pairs simultaneously possessing the advantages of high purity, high collection efficiency, high brightness, and flexibility in wavelength and bandwidth selection.
The availability of photon states with well-defined temporal modes is crucial for photonic quantum technologies. Ever since the inception of generating photonic quantum states through pulse pumped spontaneous parametric processes, many exquisite efforts have been put on improving the modal purity of the photon states to achieve single-mode operation. However, because the nonlinear interaction and linear dispersion are often mixed in parametric processes, limited successes have been achieved so far only at some specific wavelengths with sophisticated design. In this paper, we resort to a different approach by exploiting an active filtering mechanism originated from interference fringe of nonlinear interferometer. The nonlinear interferometer is realized in a sequential array of nonlinear medium, with a gap in between made of a linear dispersive medium, in which the precise modal control is realized without influencing the phase matching of the parametric process. As a proof-of-principle demonstration of the capability, we present a photon pairs source using a two-stage nonlinear interferometer formed by two identical nonlinear fibers with a standard single mode fiber in between. The results show that spectrally correlated two-photon state via four wave mixing in a single piece nonlinear fiber is modified into factorable state and heralded single-photons with high modal purity and high heralding efficiency are achievable. This novel quantum interferometric method, which can improve the quality of the photon states in almost all the aspects such as modal purity, heralding efficiency, and flexibility in wavelength selection, is proved to be effective and easy to realize.
We experimentally study a fiber-based three-stage nonlinear interferometer and demonstrate its application in generating heralded single photons with high efficiency and purity by spectral engineering. We obtain a heralding efficiency of 90% at a brightness of 0.039 photons/pulse. The purity of the source is checked by two-photon Hong-Ou-Mandel interference with a visibility of 95 ± 6% (after correcting Raman scattering and multi-pair events). Our investigation indicates that the heralded source of single photons produced by the three-stage nonlinear interferometer has the advantages of high purity, high heralding efficiency, high brightness, and flexibility in wavelength and bandwidth selection.
Nonlinear optics underpins quantum photonics by enabling the generation and control of quantum states of light. We present new applications of optical resonators as mode selectors in nonlinear processes. First, we show that cavity-enhanced spontaneous parametric down-conversion can generate spectrally uncorrelated photon pairs with improved decorrelation and wavelength flexibility. Second, we demonstrate that a cavity-assisted sum-frequency generation process realizes a quantum pulse gate with high-resolution temporal-mode selectivity and precise spectral control. Our theoretical framework provides a general methodology for analyzing cavity-enhanced nonlinear processes and highlights the versatility of optical resonators as powerful tools for engineering quantum light.