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arXiv:1911.05708 · Physical Review X

Understanding High-Gain Twin-Beam Sources Using Cascaded Stimulated Emission

Gil Triginer, Mihai D. Vidrighin, Nicolás Quesada, A. Eckstein, Merritt Moore, W. Steven Kolthammer, J. E. Sipe, Ian A. Walmsley

Published Sep 21, 2020• 27 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We present a new method for the spectral characterization of pulsed twin-beam sources in the high-gain regime, using cascaded stimulated emission.We show an implementation of this method for a periodically poled potassium titanyl phosphate spontaneous parametric down-conversion source generating up to 60 photon pairs per pulse, and we demonstrate excellent agreement between our experiments and our theory.This work enables the complete and accurate experimental characterization of high-gain effects in parametric down-conversion, including self-and cross-phase modulation.Moreover, our theory allows the exploration of designs with the goal of improving the specifications of twin-beam sources for application in quantum information, computation, sampling, and metrology.

DOI
10.1103/physrevx.10.031063

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We present a new method for the spectral characterization of pulsed twin-beam sources in the high-gain regime, using cascaded stimulated emission.We show an implementation of this method for a periodically poled potassium titanyl phosphate spontaneous parametric down-conversion source generating up to 60 photon pairs per pulse, and we demonstrate excellent agreement between our experiments and our theory.This work enables the complete and accurate experimental characterization of high-gain effects in parametric down-conversion, including self-and cross-phase modulation.Moreover, our theory allows the exploration of designs with the goal of improving the specifications of twin-beam sources for application in quantum information, computation, sampling, and metrology.
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Spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) is a reliable and robust source of photons for quantum information applications. For applications that involve operations such as entanglement swapping or single-photon heralding, two-photon states are required to be factorable (uncorrelated) in their spectral and spatial degrees of freedom. We report the design and experimental characterization of an SPDC source that has been optimized for high spectral and spatial purity. The source is pumped by the 776 nm output of a mode-locked Ti:Sapphire laser and consists of a periodically-poled Potassium Titanyl Phosphate (PPKTP) crystal phase-matched for collinear type-II SPDC. The dispersive properties of PPKTP at these wavelengths is such that it is possible to minimize the spectral entanglement by matching the widths of the pump to the spectral phase-matching function. The spatial entanglement is minimized through careful control of the pump focus, yielding nearly single-mode emission. An advantage of this approach is that the emission rate into the collection modes is very high, resulting in a very bright SPDC source. We also report a scheme that employs the output of collinear sources such as these to produce polarization-entangled photon pairs. The scheme, which requires only simple polarization elements, can be scaled to N-photon GHZ states.
We provide an efficient method for the calculation of high-gain, twin-beam generation in waveguides derived from a canonical treatment of Maxwell's equations. Equations of motion are derived that naturally accommodate photon generation via spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) or spontaneous four-wave mixing and, also, include the effects both of self-phase modulation of the pump and of cross-phase modulation of the twin beams by the pump. The equations we solve involve fields that evolve in space and are labeled by a frequency. We provide a proof that these fields satisfy bona fide commutation relations and that in the distant past and future they reduce to standard time-evolving Heisenberg operators. Having solved for the input-output relations of these Heisenberg operators we also show how to construct the ket describing the quantum state of the twin beams. Finally, we consider the example of high-gain SPDC in a waveguide with a flat nonlinearity profile, for which our approach provides an explicit solution that requires only a single matrix exponentiation.
We study the spectral properties of spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) in a periodically poled waveguided structure of potassium-titanyl-phosphate (KTP) crystal pumped by ultrashort pulses. Our theoretical analysis reveals a strongly entangled and asymmetric structure of the two-photon spectral amplitude for type-II SPDC. We confirm these predictions experimentally by measuring single-photon spectra, on one hand, and the dependence of Hong-Ou-Mandel interference visibility on the width of spectral filtering, on the other hand.
Parametric down-conversion (PDC) is mostly known in the low-gain (spontaneous) regime, in which the correlated photon pairs are produced. Spontaneous PDC (SPDC) plays a very important role for quantum optics as a variety of quantum states is produced via SPDC. In the high-gain case PDC leads to generation of bright states having up to hundreds mW mean power. With such states almost any nonlinear optical interaction or light-matter interaction becomes more efficient. Even being macroscopically bright, the produced states maintain nonclassical properties as, for example, the fluctuations of electric field quadratures are squeezed below the shot-noise level. The high-gain PDC could be used not only in the same applications as SPDC, it also can provide new ones. Apart from that the high-gain PDC has many remarkable spectral and statistical properties, which are in the focus of this work. The description starts from the PDC generation in normal and anomalous group velocity dispersion ranges. The spectrum and mode content of high-gain PDC is considered as well as their change with the parametric gain are demonstrated. Then, there are the interference effects emerging from the PDC correlations presented, namely the macroscopic analogue of the Hong-Ou-Mandel interference. In addition, it is shown how spatial and temporal walk-off matching could be used for the generation of giant narrowband twin beams. Finally, the statistical properties of high-gain PDC are reviewed as well as their use for multiphoton effects is demonstrated. Photon-number fluctuations of PDC are studied via normalized correlation functions and probability distributions. These fluctuations enhance the generation efficiency for multiphoton effects by orders of magnitude and lead to tremendously fluctuating light described by heavy-tailed photon-number probability distributions.