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arXiv:2108.08662 · Physical Review A

Phase-stable source of high-quality three-photon polarization entanglement by cascaded down-conversion

Zachary M. E. Chaisson, Patrick F. Poitras, Micaël Richard, Yannick Castonguay-Page, Paul-Henry Glinel, Véronique Landry, Deny R. Hamel

Published Jun 3, 2022• 14 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Stable sources of entangled photons are important requirements for quantum communications. In recent years, cascaded down-conversion has been demonstrated as an effective method of directly producing three-photon entanglement. However, to produce polarization entanglement these sources have until now relied on intricate active phase stabilization schemes, thus limiting their robustness and usability. In this paper, we present a completely phase-stable source of three-photon entanglement in the polarization degree of freedom. With this source, which is based on a cascade of two pair sources based on Sagnac configurations, we produce states with over 96% fidelity with an ideal Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state. Moreover, we demonstrate the stability of the source over several days without any ongoing optimization. We expect this source to be a useful tool for applications requiring multiphoton entanglement, such as quantum secret sharing and producing heralded entangled photon pairs.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.105.063705

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Stable sources of entangled photons are important requirements for quantum communications. In recent years, cascaded down-conversion has been demonstrated as an effective method of directly producing three-photon entanglement. However, to produce polarization entanglement these sources have until now relied on intricate active phase stabilization schemes, thus limiting their robustness and usability. In this paper, we present a completely phase-stable source of three-photon entanglement in the polarization degree of freedom. With this source, which is based on a cascade of two pair sources based on Sagnac configurations, we produce states with over 96% fidelity with an ideal Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state. Moreover, we demonstrate the stability of the source over several days without any ongoing optimization. We expect this source to be a useful tool for applications requiring multiphoton entanglement, such as quantum secret sharing and producing heralded entangled photon pairs.
Cascaded down conversion has been demonstrated as an effective method of directly producing three-photon entanglement. Until now, these sources have relied on intricate active phase stabilization schemes. In this work, we present a completely phase-stable source of three-photon entanglement in the polarization degree of freedom. We produce states with over 96% fidelity with an ideal Greenberger-Horn-Zeilinger state. Moreover, we demonstrate the stability of the source over several days without any ongoing optimization.
High quality entangled photon sources are a key requirement for many promising quantum optical technologies. However, the production of multi-photon entangled states with good fidelity is challenging. Current sources of multi-photon entanglement require the use of post-selection, which limits their usefulness for some applications. It has been an open challenge to create a source capable of directly producing three-photon entanglement. An important step in this direction was achieved with the demonstration of photon triplets produced by a new process called cascaded downconversion, but these previous measurements were not sufficient to show whether these photons were in an entangled state and only had detection rates of five triplets per hour. In this thesis, we show the first demonstration of a direct source of three-photon entanglement. Our source is based on cascaded downconversion, and we verify that it produces genuine tripartite entanglement in two degrees of freedom: energy-time and polarization. \n \nThe energy-time entanglement is similar to a three-particle generalization of an Einstein-Podolski-Rosen state; the three photons are created simultaneously, yet the sum of their energies is well defined, which is an indication of energy-time entanglement. To prove it, we use time-bandwidth inequalities which check for genuine tripartite entanglement. Our measurements show that the state violates the inequalities with what constitute, to the best of our knowledge, the strongest violation of time-bandwidth inequalities in a tripartite continuous-variable system to date. \n \nWe create polarization entanglement by modifying our experimental setup so that two downconversion processes producing orthogonally polarized triplets interfere to create Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states. By using highly efficient superconducting nanowire single photon detectors, we improve the detected triplet rate by 2 orders of magnitude to 660 triplets per hour. We characterize the state using quantum state tomography, and find a fidelity of 86\\% with the ideal state, beating the previous best value for a three-photon entangled state fidelity measured by tomography. We also use the state to perform two tests of local realism. We violate the Mermin and Svetlichny inequalities by 10 and 5 standard deviations respectively, the latter being the strongest violation to date. Finally, we show that, unlike previous sources of tree-photon entanglement, our source can be used as a source of heralded Bell pairs. We demonstrate this by measuring a CHSH inequality with the heralded Bell pairs, and by reconstructing their state using quantum state tomography.
Non-classical states of light are of fundamental importance for emerging quantum technologies. All optics experiments producing multi-qubit entangled states have until now relied on outcome post-selection, a procedure where only the measurement results corresponding to the desired state are considered. This method severely limits the usefulness of the resulting entangled states. fiere, we show the direct production of polarization- entangled photon triplets by cascading two entangled down-conversion processes[1]. First, a Sagnac source [2] produces non-degenerate entangled photon pairs at 776 nm and 842 nm in a Bell state. The 776 nm photon is sent through a polarizing Mach-Zehnder interferometer with a down-conversion crystal in each arm. If it is down-converted, a photon pair is created in modes 2 and 3 with a polarization state depending on the pump photon. The quantum stete describing the photon triplets is:
We demonstrate a compact and stable source of polarization-entangled pairs of photons, one at 810 nm wavelength for high detection efficiency and the other at 1550 nm for long-distance fiber communication networks. Due to a novel Sagnac-based design of the interferometer no active stabilization is needed. Using only one 30 mm ppKTP bulk crystal the source produces photons with a spectral brightness of 1.13 x 10(6) pairs/s/mW/THz with an entanglement fidelity of 98.2%. Both photons are single-mode fiber coupled and ready to be used in quantum key distribution (QKD) or transmission of photonic quantum states over large distances.
Fiber-based entangled photon sources are a key resource in emerging quantum technologies due to compactness, long-term stability and alignment-free operation. Fast control of the quantum state properties is also necessary in practical scenarios, where a universal source can be employed with different temporal and spectral configurations. Here, we report on a flexible source design that produces high-quality entanglement from continuous-wave up to GHz-pulsed operation modes. Our approach uses off-the-shelf optical components in a Sagnac configuration to generate polarization-entangled photon pairs at telecom wavelength. This design further allows phase modulation above MHz speeds with high fidelity. Together with its 60 nm spectral bandwidth, the proposed system is entirely suitable for wavelength-multiplexed and reconfigurable quantum networks, where state modulation or active bandwidth allocation is required.
We demonstrate pulsed operation of a bidirectionally pumped polarization Sagnac interferometric down-conversion source and its generation of narrow-band, high-visibility polarization-entangled photons. Driven by a narrow-band, mode-locked pump at 390.35 nm, the phase-stable Sagnac source with a type-II phase-matched periodically poled KTiOPO4{\text{KTiOPO}}_{4}KTiOPO4​ crystal is capable of producing 0.01 entangled pair per pulse in a 0.15-nm bandwidth centered at 780.7 nm with 1 mW of average pump power at a repetition rate of 31.1 MHz. We have achieved a mean photon-pair generation rate of as high as 0.7 pair per pulse, at which multipair events dominate and significantly reduce the two-photon quantum-interference visibility. For low generation probability $\ensuremath{\alpha}$, the reduced visibility $V=1\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\alpha}$ is independent of the throughput efficiency and of the polarization analysis basis, which can be utilized to yield an accurate estimate of the generation rate $\ensuremath{\alpha}$. At low $\ensuremath{\alpha}$ we have characterized the source entanglement quality in three different ways: average quantum-interference visibility of 99%, the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt SSS parameter of $2.739\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.119$, and quantum state tomography with 98.85% singlet-state fidelity. The narrow-band pulsed Sagnac source of entangled photons is suitable for use in quantum information processing applications such as free-space quantum key distribution.