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arXiv:2212.12521 · Quantum Science and Technology

Quantum-referenced spontaneous emission tomography

Imad I. Faruque, Ben M. Burridge, Milica Banić, Massimo Borghi, John E. Sipe, John G. Rarity, J Barreto

Published Aug 28, 2023• 5 citations
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Abstract

Abstract We present a method of tomography in which photon pairs from a device-under-test (DUT) are experimentally characterised by quantum interference with a reference photon pair source; we call this quantum-referenced spontaneous emission tomography (Q-SpET). In Q-SpET, the joint spectral phase (JSP) of photon pairs generated by a DUT can be reconstructed by combining four spectrally resolved interferograms. We demonstrate this theoretically and experimentally, characterising the JSP of a microresonator photon pair source. Our method is fully implemented on a chip, demonstrating the compactness, inherent phase stability, low complexity, and resource efficiency of this method.

DOI
10.1088/2058-9565/acf47b

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Abstract We present a method of tomography in which photon pairs from a device-under-test (DUT) are experimentally characterised by quantum interference with a reference photon pair source; we call this quantum-referenced spontaneous emission tomography (Q-SpET). In Q-SpET, the joint spectral phase (JSP) of photon pairs generated by a DUT can be reconstructed by combining four spectrally resolved interferograms. We demonstrate this theoretically and experimentally, characterising the JSP of a microresonator photon pair source. Our method is fully implemented on a chip, demonstrating the compactness, inherent phase stability, low complexity, and resource efficiency of this method.
The exponential growth of photonic quantum technologies is driving the demand for tools to measure the quality of their information carriers. One of the most prominent is stimulated emission tomography (SET), which uses classical coherent fields to measure the joint spectral amplitude (JSA) of photon pairs with high speed and resolution. While the modulus of the JSA can be directly addressed from a single intensity measurement, the retrieval of the joint spectral phase (JSP) is far more challenging and received minor attention. However, a wide class of spontaneous sources of technological relevance, as chip integrated micro-resonators, have a JSP with a rich structure that carries correlations hidden in the intensity domain. Here, using a compact and reconfigurable silicon photonic chip, the complex JSA of a micro-ring resonator photon pair source is measured for the first time. The photonic circuit coherently excites the ring and a reference waveguide, and the interferogram formed by their stimulated fields is used to map the ring JSP through a novel phase reconstruction technique. This tool complements the traditionally bulky and sophisticated methods implemented so far, simultaneously minimizing the set of required resources.
The ability to manipulate and measure the time-frequency structure of quantum light is useful for information processing and metrology. Measuring this structure is also important when developing quantum light sources with high modal purity that can interfere with other independent sources. Here, we present and experimentally demonstrate a scheme based on intensity interferometry to measure the joint spectral mode of photon pairs produced by spontaneous parametric down-conversion. We observe correlations in the spectral phase of the photons due to chirp in the pump. We show that our scheme can be combined with stimulated emission tomography to quickly measure their mode using bright classical light. Our scheme does not require phase stability, nonlinearities, or spectral shaping and thus is an experimentally simple way of measuring the modal structure of quantum light.
Optical-coherence tomography (OCT) is a technique that employs light in order to measure the internal structure of semitransparent, e.g. biological, samples. It is based on the interference pattern of low-coherence light. Quantum-OCT (QOCT), instead, employs the correlation properties of entangled photon pairs, for example, generated by the process of spontaneous parametric downconversion (SPDC). The usual QOCT scheme uses photon pairs characterised by a joint-spectral amplitude with strict spectral anti-correlations. It has been shown that, in contrast with its classical counterpart, QOCT provides resolution enhancement and dispersion cancellation. In this paper, we revisit the theory of QOCT and extend the theoretical model so as to include photon pairs with arbitrary spectral correlations. We present experimental results that complement the theory and explain the physical underpinnings appearing in the interference pattern. In our experiment, we utilize a pump for the SPDC process ranging from continuous wave to pulsed in the femtosecond regime, and show that cross-correlation interference effects appearing for each pair of layers may be directly suppressed for a sufficiently large pump bandwidth. Our results provide insights and strategies that could guide practical implementations of QOCT.
We identify a relation between the number of photon pairs generated by parametric fluorescence, through either spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) or spontaneous four-wave mixing, and the number generated by the corresponding stimulated process, respectively, either difference-frequency generation or stimulated four-wave mixing. On the basis of this very general result, we show that the characterization of SPDC sources of two-photon states in a given system can be performed solely by studying stimulated emission. We call this technique stimulated emission tomography (SET). We show that the number of photons detected in SET can be 9 orders of magnitude larger than the average number of coincidence counts in two-photon quantum state tomography. These results open the way to the study of sources of quantum-correlated photon pairs with unprecedented precision and unparalleled resolution.
Stimulated-emission tomography (SET) is an excellent tool for characterizing the process of spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC), which is commonly used to create pairs of entangled photons for use in quantum information protocols. The use of stimulated emission increases the average number of detected photons by several orders of magnitude compared to the spontaneous process. In a SET measurement, the parametric down conversion is seeded by an intense signal field prepared with specified mode properties rather than by broadband multimodal vacuum fluctuations, as is the case for the spontaneous process. The SET process generates an intense idler field in a mode that is the complex conjugate to the signal mode. In this work we use SET to estimate the joint spatial mode distribution (JSMD) in the Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) basis of the two photons of an entangled photon pair. The pair is produced by parametric down conversion in a beta barium borate (BBO) crystal with type-II phase matching pumped at a wavelength of 405 nm along with a 780 nm seed signal beam prepared in a variety of LG modes to generate an 842 nm idler beam of which the spatial mode distribution is measured. We observe strong idler production and good agreement with the theoretical prediction of its spatial mode distribution. Our experimental procedure should enable the efficient determination of the photon-pair wavefunctions produced by low-brightness SPDC sources and the characterization of high-dimensional entangled-photon pairs. Published by the American Physical Society 2024