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arXiv:2009.01069 · PRX Quantum

Achieving the Ultimate Quantum Timing Resolution

Vahid Ansari, Benjamin Brecht, Jano Gil-López, John M. Donohue, Jaroslav Řeháček, Z. Hradil, Luis Lorenzo Sánchez-Soto, Christine Silberhorn

Published Jan 4, 2021• 64 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Accurate time-delay measurement is at the core of many modern technologies.We present a temporalmode demultiplexing scheme that achieves the ultimate quantum precision for the simultaneous estimation of the temporal centroid, the time offset, and the relative intensities of an incoherent mixture of ultrashort pulses at the single-photon level.We experimentally resolve temporal separations 10 times smaller than the pulse duration, as well as imbalanced intensities differing by a factor of 10 2 .This represents an improvement of more than an order of magnitude over the best standard methods based on intensity detection.

DOI
10.1103/prxquantum.2.010301

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Accurate time-delay measurement is at the core of many modern technologies.We present a temporalmode demultiplexing scheme that achieves the ultimate quantum precision for the simultaneous estimation of the temporal centroid, the time offset, and the relative intensities of an incoherent mixture of ultrashort pulses at the single-photon level.We experimentally resolve temporal separations 10 times smaller than the pulse duration, as well as imbalanced intensities differing by a factor of 10 2 .This represents an improvement of more than an order of magnitude over the best standard methods based on intensity detection.
By projecting onto complex optical mode profiles, it is possible to estimate arbitrarily small separations between objects with quantum-limited precision, free of uncertainty arising from overlapping intensity profiles. Here we extend these techniques to the time-frequency domain using mode-selective sum-frequency generation with shaped ultrafast pulses. We experimentally resolve temporal and spectral separations between incoherent mixtures of single-photon level signals ten times smaller than their optical bandwidths with a tenfold improvement in precision over the intensity-only Cramér-Rao bound.