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Journal of the Optical Society of America B

Hong–Ou–Mandel interference between independent sources of heralded ultrafast single photons: influence of chirp

Xiaoxin Ma, Liang Cui, Xiaoying Li

Published Apr 27, 2015• 10 citations
Publisher

Abstract

For the quantum interference between two truly independent heralded single photon sources (HSPSs), which are generated from the spontaneous parametric processes pumping with ultrafast laser pulses, the visibility of Hong–Ou–Mandel (HOM) interference will be degraded by the mode mismatch. The mode mismatch influenced by the purity of HSPSs has been extensively investigated. Here we show that the chirp of HSPSs will change the pulse duration of ultrafast single photons and introduce additional mode mismatch. To obtain the optimized visibility, which is ultimately determined by the purity of HSPSs, the chirp of each HSPS, originated from its pulsed pump field and propagation media, should be properly managed. Our theoretical analysis shows the methods for minimizing the chirp-induced mode mismatch depend on the bandwidth and phase matching condition of the HSPSs. Our study is useful for designing the HOM interferometers in quantum information processing.

DOI
10.1364/josab.32.000946

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For the quantum interference between two truly independent heralded single photon sources (HSPSs), which are generated from the spontaneous parametric processes pumping with ultrafast laser pulses, the visibility of Hong–Ou–Mandel (HOM) interference will be degraded by the mode mismatch. The mode mismatch influenced by the purity of HSPSs has been extensively investigated. Here we show that the chirp of HSPSs will change the pulse duration of ultrafast single photons and introduce additional mode mismatch. To obtain the optimized visibility, which is ultimately determined by the purity of HSPSs, the chirp of each HSPS, originated from its pulsed pump field and propagation media, should be properly managed. Our theoretical analysis shows the methods for minimizing the chirp-induced mode mismatch depend on the bandwidth and phase matching condition of the HSPSs. Our study is useful for designing the HOM interferometers in quantum information processing.
Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference is one of the most important experimental phenomena in quantum optics. It has drawn considerable attention with respect to quantum cryptography and quantum communication because of the advent of the measurement device independent (MDI) quantum key distribution (QKD) protocol. Here, we realize HOM interference, having a visibility of approximately 38.1%, using two independent heralded single-photon sources (HSPSs). The HOM interference between two independent HSPSs is a core technology for realizing the long-distance MDI QKD protocol, the quantum coin-tossing protocol, and other quantum cryptography protocols.
Heralded single photons (HSPs) generated by spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) are useful resource to achieve various photonic quantum information processing. Given a large-scale experiment which needs multiple HSPs, increasing the generation rate with suppressing higher-order pair creation is desirable. One of the promising ways is to use a pump laser with a GHz-order repetition rate. In such a high repetition rate regime, however, single-photon detectors can only partially identify the pulses. Hence, we develop a simple model to consider that effect on the spectral purity, and experimentally demonstrate a high-visibility Hong-Ou-Mandel interference between two independent HSPs generated by SPDC with 3.2 GHz-repetition-rate mode-locked pump pulses. The observed visibility of 0.88(3) is in good agreement with our theoretical model.
A high visibility Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference between two independently prepared photons plays an important role in various photonic quantum information processing. In a standard HOM experiment using photons generated by pulse-pumped spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC), larger detection time windows than the coherence time of photons have been employed for measuring the HOM visibility and/or drawing the HOM dip. If large amounts of stray photons continuously exist within the detection time windows, employing small detection time windows is favorable for reducing the effect of background noises. Especially, such a setup is helpful for the HOM experiment using continuous wave (cw)-pumped SPDC and the time-resolved coincidence measurement. Here we argue that the method for determining the HOM visibility used in the previous cw experiments tends to suffer from distortion arising from biased contribution of the background noises. We then present a new method with unbiased treatment of the cw backgrounds. By using this method, we experimentally demonstrate a high visibility HOM interference of two heralded telecom photons independently generated by SPDC with employing cw pump light. An observed HOM visibility is 0.87 ± 0.04, which is as high as those observed by using pulse-pumped SPDC photons.
Single photon sources (SPSs) play important roles in quantum communication and quantum information processing. Spontaneous four wave mixing (SFWM) in optical fibers provides a promising way to realize practical heralded single photon sources (HSPSs), since it is compatible with current techniques of optical communications. In this paper, two independent HSPSs at 1.5μm band are realized in one polarization maintaining dispersion shifted fiber (PM-DSF) utilizing its large birefringence. When pulsed pump light passes through an optical fiber, two kinds of SFWM will take place simultaneously. One is scalar processes, in which two annihilated pump photons and generated photon pair are all polarized along the same fiber polarization axis. The other is vector processes, in which two annihilated pump photons are polarized along different fiber polarization axes, either for the two photons of the generated pair. In the PM-DSF, the large birefringence generates obvious walk-off effect on the two pump polarization components, which leads to an effective suppression of the vector processes. Hence, by proper pump polarization, correlated photon pairs (CPPs) with different polarization directions can be generated independently by the two scalar processes, which can be used to realize two independent HSPSs. The indistinguishability of the heralded photons generated by the two independent sources is demonstrated by an experiment of Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference. Using a fiber coupler as the beam splitter, a visibility of HOM dip of 76% is achieved, showing their potential on quantum information.