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arXiv:2512.19129

Narrowband Frequency-Entangled Photon Source for Hong-Ou-Mandel Interferometry

Yen-Ju Chen, Sheng-Hsuan Huang, Thomas Dirmeier, Kaisa Laiho, Dmitry V. Strekalov, Andrea Aiello, Gerd Leuchs, Christoph Marquardt

quant-phSubmitted Dec 22, 2025• Announced Dec 23, 2025• 0 citations
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Abstract

Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interferometry with entangled photons exhibits distinctive quantum features. By introducing frequency entanglement (discrete-color entangled states) into HOM interference, the characteristic HOM dip is modulated by sinusoidal fringes, which significantly enhance the sensitivity of HOM sensors. The frequency-entangled photon sources demonstrated to date rely on non-resonant parametric down-conversion (PDC), which limits the photon coherence length and, consequently, restricts the sensing dynamic range to the sub-millimeter scale. In this work, we demonstrate narrowband frequency-entangled photon source based on resonant PDC in a crystalline whispering gallery mode resonator. The MHz-level spectral bandwidth of photons enables a meter-scale dynamic range. With highly nondegenerate frequency-entangled photon pairs featuring a 96 THz frequency detuning, we observe high-contrast quantum beating with sub-picosecond resolution in the HOM experiment. Our WGMR-based frequency-entangled photon source has potential applications in quantum metrology and quantum information processing.

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quant-pharXiv:2609.14937•Sep 15, 2026•0 citations
Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interferometry with entangled photons exhibits distinctive quantum features. By introducing frequency entanglement (discrete-color entangled states) into HOM interference, the characteristic HOM dip is modulated by sinusoidal fringes, which significantly enhance the sensitivity of HOM sensors. The frequency-entangled photon sources demonstrated to date rely on non-resonant parametric down-conversion (PDC), which limits the photon coherence length and, consequently, restricts the sensing dynamic range to the sub-millimeter scale. In this work, we demonstrate narrowband frequency-entangled photon source based on resonant PDC in a crystalline whispering gallery mode resonator. The MHz-level spectral bandwidth of photons enables a meter-scale dynamic range. With highly nondegenerate frequency-entangled photon pairs featuring a 96 THz frequency detuning, we observe high-contrast quantum beating with sub-picosecond resolution in the HOM experiment. Our WGMR-based frequency-entangled photon source has potential applications in quantum metrology and quantum information processing.
Hong–Ou–Mandel (HOM) interferometry with entangled photons exhibits distinctive quantum features. By introducing frequency entanglement (discrete-color entangled states) into HOM interference, the characteristic HOM dip is modulated by sinusoidal fringes, which significantly enhances the sensitivity of HOM sensors. The frequency-entangled photon sources demonstrated to date rely on non-resonant parametric down-conversion (PDC), which limits the photon coherence length and, consequently, restricts the sensing dynamic range to the millimeter scale. In this work, we demonstrate narrowband frequency-entangled photon source based on resonant PDC in a crystalline whispering gallery mode resonator. The MHz-level spectral bandwidth of photons enables a meter-scale dynamic range. With highly nondegenerate frequency-entangled photon pairs featuring a 96 THz frequency detuning, we observe high-contrast quantum beating with sub-picosecond resolution in the HOM experiment. Our WGMR-based frequency-entangled photon source has potential applications in quantum metrology and quantum information processing.
Quantum entanglement is a vital resource in quantum information processing. High-dimensional quantum entanglement offers advantages that classical systems cannot surpass, particularly in enhancing channel capacity, improving system noise resilience, and increasing sensitivity to external environments. The construction of multimode entanglement in the spectral domain is well-suited for fiber-optic systems. Here, we present a straightforward scheme for generating multimode frequency-bin entanglement using a semiconductor chip through a simple mode conversion. A general model for Hong–Ou–Mandel (HOM) interference with a multimode frequency-bin entangled state is presented and applied to the experiments. The multimode entangled photons we produced exhibit HOM interference with a high-visibility beating pattern, demonstrating a strong relationship with the mode number, mode spacing, and the profile of the single mode. Building on the Fisher information analysis, we explore the relationship between the features in multimode entangled state interference traces and the precision of interferometric measurements even in the presence of experimental nonidealities. This work may deepen the understanding of multimode frequency-bin entanglement and advance the application of multimode HOM interference in quantum sensing.
We present progress toward measuring nanometer-scale vibrations via a frequency-entangled two-photon interferometer. Unlike classical interference, two-photon – or Hong-Ou-Mandel – interference allows for optical metrology with resilience against imbalanced loss, dispersion, and optical background. However, the resolution of traditional degenerate frequency two-photon interference is limited by the photons’ bandwidths, requiring large bandwidths or long integration times to achieve nanometer-scale resolution. We have implemented a twophoton interferometer utilizing highly non-degenerate frequency-entangled photon pairs at 810 nm and 1550 nm, drastically increasing measurement sensitivity while retaining the advantages of two-photon interference. This enhancement comes via a beat note with frequency proportional to the photon detuning of 177 THz. The resulting measurement saturates the quantum Cram´er-Rao bound, maximizing the information extracted per photon. We have demonstrated a measurement resolution of 2.3 nm with fewer than 18,000 detected photon pairs, orders of magnitude better than previous results. By reflecting one photon from the pair off a target surface, we may use our system to study small-scale vibrations.
Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interferometry is a powerful quantum metrology technique to reconstruct the surface-depth profile of transparent samples with complementary benefits of measurement precision and experimental robustness. It is generally assumed that a trade-off exists between the standard HOM interferometry sensitivity and its ambiguity-free dynamic range. Here we challenge this ``well-known'' assumption through the implementation of spectrally resolved HOM interferometry with discrete color entanglement, and show that the well-separated frequencies embedded in a quantum state suffices to achieve great advantages in enhancing the temporal resolution but without limiting its ambiguity-free dynamic range. Backed by the Fisher-information analysis, spectrally resolved coincidence detection is an optimal measurement strategy as it enables us to recover the quantum Cram\'er-Rao bound. These results may significantly facilitate the use of spectrally resolved quantum interference for real-time quantum information processing, such as ultrafast phase transition and spectral-temporal photography.
This paper reports a novel single mode source of narrow-band entangled photon pairs at telecom wavelengths under continuous wave (CW) excitation, based on parametric down conversion. For only 7 mW of pump power it has a created spectral radiance of 0.08 pairs per coherence length and a bandwidth of 10 pm (1.2 GHz). The effectively emitted spectral brightness reaches 3.9 × 10 5 pairs s −1 pm −1 . Furthermore, when combined with low jitter single photon detectors, such sources allow for the implementation of quantum communication protocols without any active synchronization or path length stabilization. A Hong–Ou–Mandel (HOM)-dip with photons from two autonomous CW sources has been realized demonstrating the setup's stability and performance.
The Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference in the multimode frequency domain has been explored for precision metrology, with several experimental demonstrations exploiting its robustness against dispersion and phase noise, as well as its large dynamic range and compatibility with fragile samples. Conventional multimode HOM metrology exploits frequency-entangled states, which naturally satisfy bosonic exchange symmetry under any centered symmetric joint spectral distribution, to provide these advantages. However, these entangled states are typically generated via spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC), requiring strong pump lasers that hinder practical implementation. In this paper, we employ frequency product states, which do not possess entanglement or path-mode exchange symmetry, as the probe state and post-select measurement outcomes exhibiting frequency anti-correlation. Our results demonstrate that these advantages,peak narrowing, dispersion cancellation, phase-noise immunity, a large dynamic range, and compatibility with fragile samples, arise neither from entanglement nor from bosonic exchange symmetry, but rather from spectral anti-correlation. We further show that entanglement is not the source of the measurement precision: the entanglement-free approach attains the same quantum Fisher information as the entangled-state scheme, indicating that the fundamental precision limit does not originate from entanglement.