Entangled photons are at the heart of experimental quantum physics. They were used for the first fundamental tests of quantum theory, and became a basic building block for many novel quantum protocols, such as quantum cryptography, dense coding or teleportation. Therefore, the efficient generation of entangled photons, as well as their distribution and accurate analysis are of paramount importance, particularly with regard to the practicability of many applications of quantum communication. This thesis deals largely with the problem of efficient generation of photonic entanglement with the principal aim of developing a bright source of polarization-entangled photon pairs, which meets the requirements for reliable and economic operation of quantum communication prototypes and demonstrators. Our approach uses a correlated photon-pair emission in nonlinear process of spontaneous parametric down-conversion pumped by light coming from a compact and cheap blue laser diode. Two alternative source configurations are examined within the thesis. The first makes use of a well established concept of degenerate non-collinear emission from a single type-II nonlinear crystal and the second relies on a novel method where the emissions from two adjacent type-I phase-matched nonlinear crystals operated in collinear non-degenerate regime are coherently overlapped. The latter approach showed to be more effective, yielding a total detected rate of almost 10^6 pairs/s at >98 % quantum interference visibility of polarization correlations. This performance, together with the almost free of alignment operation of the system, suggest that it is an especially promising candidate for many future practical applications, including quantum cryptography, detector calibration or use in undergraduate lab courses. The second issue addressed within the thesis is the simplification and practical implementation of quantum-assisted solutions to multiparty communication tasks. While the recent rapid progress in the development of bright entangled photon-pair sources has been followed with ample experimental reports on two-party quantum communication tasks, the practical implementations of tasks for more than two parties have been held back, so far. This is mainly due to the requirement of multiparty entangled states, which are very difficult to be produced with current methods and moreover suffer from a high noise. We show that entanglement is not the only non-classical resource endowing the quantum multiparty information processing its power. Instead, only the sequential communication and transformation of a single qubit can be sufficient to accomplish certain tasks. This we prove for two distinct communication tasks, secret sharing and communication complexity. Whereas the goal of the first is to split a cryptographic key among several parties in a way that its reconstruction requires their collaboration, the latter aims at reducing the amount of communication during distributed computational tasks. Importantly, our qubit-assisted solutions to the problems are feasible with state-of-the-art technology. This we clearly demonstrate in the laboratory implementation for 6 and 5 parties, respectively, which is to the best of our knowledge the highest number of actively performing parties in a quantum protocol ever implemented. Thus, by successfully solving and implementing a cryptographic task as well as a task originating in computer science, we clearly illustrate the potential to introduce multiparty communication problems into real life.
Entangled photons are at the heart of experimental quantum physics. They were used for the first fundamental tests of quantum theory, and became a basic building block for many novel quantum protocols, such as quantum cryptography, dense coding or teleportation. Therefore, the efficient generation of entangled photons, as well as their distribution and accurate analysis are of paramount importance, particularly with regard to the practicability of many applications of quantum communication. This thesis deals largely with the problem of efficient generation of photonic entanglement with the principal aim of developing a bright source of polarization-entangled photon pairs, which meets the requirements for reliable and economic operation of quantum communication prototypes and demonstrators. Our approach uses a correlated photon-pair emission in nonlinear process of spontaneous parametric down-conversion pumped by light coming from a compact and cheap blue laser diode. Two alternative source configurations are examined within the thesis. The first makes use of a well established concept of degenerate non-collinear emission from a single type-II nonlinear crystal and the second relies on a novel method where the emissions from two adjacent type-I phase-matched nonlinear crystals operated in collinear non-degenerate regime are coherently overlapped. The latter approach showed to be more effective, yielding a total detected rate of almost 10^6 pairs/s at >98 % quantum interference visibility of polarization correlations. This performance, together with the almost free of alignment operation of the system, suggest that it is an especially promising candidate for many future practical applications, including quantum cryptography, detector calibration or use in undergraduate lab courses. The second issue addressed within the thesis is the simplification and practical implementation of quantum-assisted solutions to multiparty communication tasks. While the recent rapid progress in the development of bright entangled photon-pair sources has been followed with ample experimental reports on two-party quantum communication tasks, the practical implementations of tasks for more than two parties have been held back, so far. This is mainly due to the requirement of multiparty entangled states, which are very difficult to be produced with current methods and moreover suffer from a high noise. We show that entanglement is not the only non-classical resource endowing the quantum multiparty information processing its power. Instead, only the sequential communication and transformation of a single qubit can be sufficient to accomplish certain tasks. This we prove for two distinct communication tasks, secret sharing and communication complexity. Whereas the goal of the first is to split a cryptographic key among several parties in a way that its reconstruction requires their collaboration, the latter aims at reducing the amount of communication during distributed computational tasks. Importantly, our qubit-assisted solutions to the problems are feasible with state-of-the-art technology. This we clearly demonstrate in the laboratory implementation for 6 and 5 parties, respectively, which is to the best of our knowledge the highest number of actively performing parties in a quantum protocol ever implemented. Thus, by successfully solving and implementing a cryptographic task as well as a task originating in computer science, we clearly illustrate the potential to introduce multiparty communication problems into real life.
At the heart of quantum physics lies the principle of superposition, and at the heart of information theory lies the bit. Perhaps the most useful property of quantum systems is that they can be loaded with information bits, so-called qubits, that are indefinitely both 0 and 1 until a measurement is made. Another consequence is that several qubits can become entangled, which is manifested by the non-classical correlations between such quantum systems when measured in all possible bases. Within the rapidly progressing fields of quantum information and quantum communication these quantum effects are utilized to perform tasks such as quantum computing and quantum cryptography. In this thesis we present experimental and theoretical work using single photon sources to prepare ``flying'' photonic qubits. We describe work using mainly quasi-phase-matched nonlinear crystals to generate beams of entangled photon pairs, that are either encoded in polarization at near-visible wavelengths, or in time at optical fiber telecommunication wavelengths (1550 nm). The optical fiber is the medium used for transporting the qubits over a long distance, and it is therefore essential to couple the photons well into the fibers. By focusing the beams optimally, we have investigated how this problem can meet the requirement of creating photons of a narrow frequency bandwidth and a high photon flux. Furthermore, we have generated truly single photons that are heralded by an electrical signal. As a result of modifying the statistics of such sources we have been able to show the effect of photon antibunching. In two separate works, we have implemented a quantum key distribution system based on faint laser pulses at the telecom wavelength of 1550 nm, as well as protocols based on entanglement for performing authentication of key distribution in quantum cryptography.
Efficient Generation of Entangled Photon-Pairs The first experiments with correlated photons have been performed in the context of EPR-Bell experiments on the realistic and local properties of quantum mechanics. The source used there produced pairs of polarization entangled photons from a 2-photon decay of Calcium atoms. The technical requirements of these experiments were high (vacuum systems, stronge dye-lasers, etc.) whereas the efficiency of the source was quite low. An important step forward was the introduction of spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC), which has become the most common source in quantum optics for generating correlated or entangled photon pairs. In this process photons of an intense pump laser convert to photon pairs in an optical nonlinear crystal. Conservation of energy and momentum leads to strong correlations between the generated photons. With this kind of two-photon source it was possible to realize or improve many experiments on the foundations of quantum mechanics addressing the EPR-Paradoxon and in the new field of quantum information. But again, more advanced experiments and applications suffer from the limited ef- ficiency of the fluorescence process. Many photon pairs are lost by spatial and spectral filtering, which is necessary to achieve polarization entanglement and long coherence times. Different techniques have been implemented to increase the number of photon pairs using two-crystal arrangements, focusing techniques or periodically poled crystals. Most of these methods have the disadvantage that no entangled photons have been observed. It is the aim of this work to increase the yield and to improve the mode definition of entangled photon pairs generated by resonant enhancement of the pump mode and the fluorescence modes. As a first step a linear cavity for the pump mode was realized. Since the conversion probability is proportional to the pump power it was possible to increase the photon pair count rate by factor of 7 over the previous source. Besides the possibility of further improvement on already established pair correlation experiments, such an enhancement allows to build a compact source for photon pairs, in which an expensive argon-ion laser is replaced by a cheap diode laser. Among other applications such sources are of strong interest for quantum cryptography. 3 In many quantum information experiments optical fibers are use to carry the photons over long distance. Therefore, light from the parametric down-conversion source has to be efficiently coupled into fibers. In the second part we report on a new method to optimize collection efficiency by matching the angular distribution of the parametric fluorescence to the spatial mode of an optical fiber. By using this technique, we detected 366500 polarization-entangled photon pairs per second in the near-infrared region in single-mode optical fibers for 465 mW pump power (at 351.1 nm) with a 2 mm BBOcrystal. The entanglement of the photon pairs was verified by measuring polarization correlations of more than 96% in a HV-basis and in a ±45◦-basis. To our knowledge, such enormous count rates of highly entangled photon pairs have not been reached yet with any other technique. In the third part of this thesis we investigated the process of parametric downconversion in a cavity which is resonant to certain longitudinal down-conversion modes only. The idea of placing the parametric down-conversion source inside a cavity is not new. Such a device is usually referred to as a single or double resonant optical parametric oscillator (OPO) and is mainly used to generate squeezed quantum states. In that kind of application the system is operating close to but still under the threshold of oscillation. In our application the situation is quite different. The system is operating far below threshold so that mainly spontaneous emission occurs. In that mode correlations between single photons can still be observed. But bouncing the light back and forth inside the cavity increases the interaction length and hence enhances the signal levels of the down-conversion fields. Further, by resonating two certain modes only, the bandwidth is reduced by orders of magnitude and the coherence time is found to be inverse proportional to the bandwidth. A similar experiment has already been realized with a type-I parametric down-converter in the resonator. We have tried to realize a compact double resonant OPO far below threshold with a type-II parametric down-converter in a high-finesse cavity to realize a bright source of entangled photon pairs with extremely narrow bandwidth.
This thesis deals with the production of entangled photons using spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC). We start with a short overview of some important theoretical concepts. First we provide a brief reminder of the theory of entanglement. We then discuss how the state of quantum systems can be determined using quantum state tomography. We also explain SPDC, the physical process which we use to produce entangled photons. Finally, we give an overview of the methods which have been used to produce entangled photons in the past, both for two- and three-photon entanglement. \n \nThe first experiment is the design of an efficient source of entangled photon pairs based on a polarizing Sagnac interferometer configuration. With this configuration, we can use quasi-phasematched materials which allow for higher efficiencies than standard bulk nonlinear materials. The source is pumped by a low-power continuous-wave laser diode, and produces degenerate photon pairs at 809nm. It has a spectral brightness of 87,500 pairs/(s mW nm), and the fidelity of the produced quantum states with a Bell state is 98.9%. The source is used for experiments in quantum key distribution, cluster state quantum computing, remote state preparation, state discrimination, and entanglement-enhanced classical communication. \n \nThe second experiment discussed in this thesis is the generation of photon triplets using cascaded SPDC. In this experiment, a primary SPDC source is pumped with a low-power, continuous-wave laser diode, producing photon pairs. Single photons from these pairs serve as the pump for a second down-conversion, resulting in photon triplets. This is the first demonstration of the direct production of photon triplets, and the first observation of SPDC at the single photon level. This method could potentially be used to produce entangled photon triplets without post-selection, and as a source of triggered Bell pairs.
The creation and manipulation of biphotons is important for many applications in quantum optics and quantum information. Topics that benefit from efficient biphoton sources range from the most fundamental quantum science experiments to the highly applied fields of quantum communication and quantum computation. Biphoton sources have long been hailed as one of the leading methods for creating entangled photon pairs for tests of Bell's inequality, creating heralded photon pairs that are used in on-demand single-photon sources and heralded measurement techniques, and for quantum communication protocols to name a few. Specifically for quantum communication, biphoton sources are commonly used for cutting edge quantum key distribution (QKD) protocols. In the first part of the thesis, I focus on realizing an efficient biphoton source that produces high yield photon pairs. More specifically, I develop an optimized biphoton source using the nonlinear optical process of spontaneous parametric down-conversion in a second-order nonlinear crystal. I develop a formalism for predicting the two important metrics of a biphoton source: the heralding efficiency and joint count rate. I show how, from a large parameter space, one can tailor the phase matching of the nonlinear interaction to create a high quality biphoton source that produces both high heralding efficiency and high joint count rate. I achieve heralding efficiencies of 86$\\pm5\\%$ and joint count rates of 2.58$\\pm0.6kHzpermWpumppower.Ishowthatusingacollinearnondegenerategeometryallowsforheraldingefficienciesofupto99.7\\%$ assuming no loss in the system. I verify the theoretical model with experimental results and find good agreement. In the second part of the thesis I turn to manipulating the single photons born from the biphoton source for applications in creating single-photon spectrometers and time-frequency QKD systems. The security of QKD is only guaranteed if the two parties have access to a set of states called mutually unbiased states. I create a set of these states in time and their conjugate states in the frequency basis and show that I can manipulate single photon correlations in time and frequency so that an eavesdropper can be detected if she localizes a photon to a 1 ns time interval. Additionally, in these experiments, I stretch a single photon wavepacket of 5-ps-width to a wavepacket of 8.3-ns-width and subsequently recompress it to at least the resolution of the detectors (sim 300 ps). This demonstrates a stretch factor of >1600 for a single-photon pulse using a group velocity dispersive material. To my knowledge, this is the largest reported stretch factor for a single-photon wavepacket produced by a biphoton source. The ability to stretch and recompress a single photon by this amount has applications in creating high-resolution, high-efficiency, single-photon spectrometers as well as advancing time-frequency QKD systems and other temporal pulse shaping applications.
The quantum description of light offers a unique set of optical effects that has led to promising applications beyond those described by classical physics. Although well-defined quantum states of light do not persist in typical classical environments, phenomena such as entanglement often enhance optical approaches to communication, measurement, and sensing. With the emergence of new tasks in classical and quantum optical technology, new tools are required that must be specifically engineered including the generation of quantum states. This thesis is concerned with three principle tasks in engineering and implementing entangled photonic states. First, the use of frequency anti-correlated and polarization entangled two-photon states generated during spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC) to precisely evaluate optical delays with quantum interferometry is demonstrated in a realistic commercially available optical telecommunication device. Second, the study of correlated orbital angular momentum (OAM) states for efficient object identification is presented. Finally, experimental efforts towards the development of sources for entangled weak coherent states are discussed. The generation of broadband entangled states leading to well-defined second order interference patterns is a necessary step for the application of low coherence quantum interferometry as a metrological device. The flexibility of non-uniformly chirped periodically poled nonlinear crystals offers a rich set of tools for precise state engineering. The experimental evaluation of a broadband source of polarization entanglement is presented. In addition, design considerations for applications that require optimized quantum interference features are discussed along with a numerical investigation of the limits of quantum interferometry with even order dispersion cancellation. We present an experimental demonstration of correlated OAM sensing exploiting the two-dimensional and correlated nature of states produced during SPDC projected onto the OAM basis. Efficient object recognition through the identification of azimuthal symmetries of arbitrary objects is achieved by observing the full two-photon joint OAM spectrum and focusing on non-conserved OAM components not found in the natural OAM spectrum of SPDC. Finally, quantum key distribution (QKD) is currently the most successful quantum optical application; however, a limiting trade off between the achievable rates and distances confines the approach to niche applications. The generation of entangled coherent states has been proposed to transition QKD into a new regime that would set aside single photons and two-photon entangled states for higher intensity coherent pulses. The key technical limitation that has prohibited the demonstration of such states is a reliable source of single-photon cross phase modulation. The plausibility and experimental efforts towards creating such an environment in a solid state device is presented.
Quantum information and quantum optics offer powerful innovative tools for secure communication and cryptography, with Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) becoming a standard technology in the cryptographic world. By exploiting fundamental principles such as quantum superposition, entanglement, and the no-cloning theorem, QKD enables two users to establish a shared secret key with information-theoretic security. Quantum communication is a fundamental element for the realization of the quantum internet, a network of distant nodes connected by quantum channel. The realization of such networks requires methods to distribute states and correlations with high fidelity and low losses. This thesis explores the use of innovative photonic technologies for the realization of experiment aiming at improving quantum communication and quantum channels. Single photons based on QD are generated on-demand and show high purity, near-optimal indistinguishability and low multi-photons emission. By exploiting the features of these photons, a method to realize entangled states is implemented. Using the polarization degree of freedom, these entangled states are ideal candidates for free-space QKD protocols based on the Bell’s inequality. To address the problem of the reference frame alignment using the polarization, hybrid states are studied and implemented. The specific combination of polarization and orbital angular momentum (OAM) can produce photons that are not modified by rotation of the reference frame. We implemented an experiment to realize a QKD that is independent on the relative rotation of the two user. The final goal of my thesis was devoted to the in-field demonstration of quantum teleportation as a fundamental building block of distributed quantum networks, enabling the reliable transmission of quantum information between remote nodes. Exploiting the free-space infrastructure in the "Sapienza" University of Rome, a link of around ∼ 300 m, we implemented the quantum teleportation between two different QDs showing the possibility of using this technology into real-case scenario. The results obtained show not only that QDs are ideal sources for quantum communication, but also the possibility of using new states to improve current technologies, advancing the development of efficient and reliable quantum networks.