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Physical Review Letters

Efficient Two-Photon Light Amplification by a Coherent Biexciton Wave

R. Shimano, Yuri P. Svirko, A. Mysyrowicz, Makoto Kuwata‐Gonokami

Published Nov 13, 2002• 10 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A reversible coupling between photon pair states and a long-lived, highly coherent biexciton wave in CuCl allows efficient phase-sensitive two-photon amplification or attenuation of ultrashort light pulses. We demonstrate a gain of 350 cm(-1) for a pump intensity of 1 MW/cm(2), nearly 2 orders of magnitude higher than that achievable with conventional parametric crystal amplifiers. We develop a theoretical model that describes this new type of parametric converter where the light pump is replaced by a coherent biexciton wave and show that it is well suited for the generation of entangled photons and the squeezing of an optical beam with ultrafast time gating.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.89.233601

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A reversible coupling between photon pair states and a long-lived, highly coherent biexciton wave in CuCl allows efficient phase-sensitive two-photon amplification or attenuation of ultrashort light pulses. We demonstrate a gain of 350 cm(-1) for a pump intensity of 1 MW/cm(2), nearly 2 orders of magnitude higher than that achievable with conventional parametric crystal amplifiers. We develop a theoretical model that describes this new type of parametric converter where the light pump is replaced by a coherent biexciton wave and show that it is well suited for the generation of entangled photons and the squeezing of an optical beam with ultrafast time gating.
Modification of electromagnetic quantum fluctuations in the form of quadrature squeezing is a central quantum resource, which can be generated from nonlinear optical processes. Such a process is facilitated by coherent two-photon excitation of the strongly bound biexciton in atomically thin semiconductors. We show theoretically that interfacing an atomically thin semiconductor with an optical cavity makes it possible to harness this two-photon resonance and use the biexcitonic parametric gain to generate squeezed light with input power an order of magnitude below current state-of-the-art devices with conventional third-order nonlinear materials that rely on far off-resonant nonlinearities. Furthermore, the squeezing bandwidth is found to be in the range of several meV. These results identify atomically thin semiconductors as a promising candidate for on-chip squeezed-light sources.
Phase-sensitive optical parametric amplification of squeezed states helps to overcome detection loss and noise and thus increases the robustness of sub-shot-noise sensing. Because such techniques, e.g., imaging and spectroscopy, operate with multimode light, multimode amplification is required. Here we find the optimal methods for multimode phase-sensitive amplification and verify them in an experiment where a pumped second-order nonlinear crystal is seeded with a Gaussian coherent beam. Phase-sensitive amplification is obtained by tightly focusing the seed into the crystal, rather than seeding with close-to-plane waves. This suggests that phase-sensitive amplification of sub-shot-noise images should be performed in the near field. A similar recipe can be formulated for the time and frequency, which makes this work relevant for quantum-enhanced spectroscopy.
We propose an experimental scheme to evaluate the intrinsic anharmonicity of the biexciton ensemble by extending the conventional four-wave mixing technique to coherent biexciton waves, which can be prepared by two-photon absorption of ultrashort optical pulses. The anharmonicity originates from the two-body interaction of the bosonic quasi-particles at low densities and leads to Kerr-type nonlinearity for the coherent biexcitonic waves generated in the crystal. We discuss the feasibility of determining the two-body biexciton interaction energy in CuCl by measuring the anharmonicity of the biexcitonic ensemble.
Absolute measurement of detector quantum efficiency using optical parametric down-conversion has been extensively studied for the case of a continuous wave pump. In this paper, we have used the temporally and spatially correlated properties of the down-converted photon pairs generated in a nonlinear crystal pumped by a femtosecond laser pulse to perform an absolute measurement of detector quantum efficiency. The measured detector quantum efficiency is in excellent agreement with the measured value in the conventional way. A lens with a long focal length was adopted for efficiently increasing the intensity of the down-conversion entangled photon source.
Abstract We discuss the generation of entangled photons using a nonlinear photonic crystal and beam splitter. In our method, the photonic crystal is assumed to be composed of a material with a large second-order nonlinear optical susceptibility χ ( 2 ) . Our proposal relies on two facts: (1) A nonlinear photonic crystal changes coherent incident light into squeezed light. (2) A beam splitter transforms the squeezed light into entangled light beams flying in two different directions. We estimate the yield efficiency of pairs of entangled photons per pulse of the very weak coherent light for our method at 0.0783 for a specific concrete example. Our method is more effective because the conversion efficiency (entangled biphotons per incident pump photons) in the spontaneous parametric downconversion is of the order of 4 × 10 − 6 . The only drawback is that it requires very fine tuning of the frequency of signal photons fed into the photonic crystal; for example, an adjustment is given by Δ ν = 3.11 × 10 8 Hz for the signal light of ν = 3.23 × 10 14 Hz. We investigate the application of entangled photons produced by our method to the BB84 quantum key distribution protocol, and we explore how to detect an eavesdropper. We suggest that our method is promising for decoy-state quantum key distribution using weak coherent light.