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Europhysics Letters (EPL)

High-Visibility Two-Photon Interference in a Single-Mode-Fibre Interferometer

John Rarity, James G. Burnett, P. R. Tapster, R. Paschotta

Published Apr 10, 1993• 11 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We measure fourth-order interference occurring when energy-entangled photon pairs are launched into opposite ports of a single-mode-fibre interferometer. The resulting 90% coincidence fringe visibility is limited only by dispersion and polarisation alignment. The experiment could be extended to one consisting of two identical well-separated interferometers to demonstrate violations of local realism at kilometer separations.

DOI
10.1209/0295-5075/22/2/004

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We measure fourth-order interference occurring when energy-entangled photon pairs are launched into opposite ports of a single-mode-fibre interferometer. The resulting 90% coincidence fringe visibility is limited only by dispersion and polarisation alignment. The experiment could be extended to one consisting of two identical well-separated interferometers to demonstrate violations of local realism at kilometer separations.
A two-photon interference experiment is presented in which an entangled pair of photons generated from a parametric down-conversion was incident on two input ports of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer. The experiment was carried out using two photon coincidence detection with two detectors at the two output ports of the interferometer. The measured coincidence counts exhibit an interference effect with visibility of 0.75 at simultaneous inputs and 0.38 at inputs with different arrival times according to the degree of photon number entanglement.
We have performed an EPR-type experiment first proposed by Franson,1 resulting in two-particle interference that is both nonclassical and nonlocal. We used photon pairs produced in an entangled state of energy via spontaneous down-conversion. Each photon enters an unbalanced interferometer, and we detect singles and coincidence rates at the output ports. If the long- and short-arm path-length difference is much greater than the photons’ coherence lengths, no fringes are seen in singles as the arm lengths are varied. Yet when the difference between the path-length differences of the two interferometers is less than these coherence lengths, fringes are observed in coincidence, resulting from an interference of the (indistinguishable) “long–long” and “short–short" coincidence possibilities. If the electronic resolution is sufficient to eliminate the background of "short–long" and "long–short” coincidences, the visibility may be as high as 100%.2 For V > 71%, with certain reasonable auxiliary assumptions, Bell’s inequalities can be violated. The interpretation is that no local, realistic model can yield the observed results. The use of this type of entangled state is significant because it is much closer to the original EPR paradox than the spin-singlet case commonly considered.
We perform a two-photon interference experiment in a Michelson interferometer with photon pairs produced by spontaneous parametric down-conversion. The interferometer is set to a path difference much larger than the coherence length of the light field. Application of a time-resolved coincidence detection scheme reveals two-photon interference fringes with a visibility of 87%. This high visibility clearly demonstrates the nonclassical nature of the observed interference and should allow further spin-free tests of Bell's inequalities.
In a Franson interferometer two-photon interference fringes occur despite the photons never encountering each other [1]. This phenomenon is a fundamental demonstration of the nonlocal nature of quantum mechanics. It serves also as a direct proof of frequency-time-entanglement. Furthermore, it can benefit not only from local, but also nonlocal dispersion cancellation techniques [2], which is a very useful property when working with spectrally broad photon pairs. More specifically, one has to distinguish between dispersion occuring before the individual Mach-Zehnder interferometers (MZIs), which constitute the Franson interferometer, and within them. Analysis of influences up to second order has shown that no loss of contrast can be expected from dispersion before the Franson interferometer. Differential second-order dispersion inside the interferometer, however, can cause a reduction of contrast in the interferogram [3].
We report an experiment in which two-photon interference occurs between degenerate single photons that never meet. The two photons travel in opposite directions through our fiber-optic interferometer and interference occurs when the photons reach two different, spatially separated, two-by-two couplers at the same time. We show that this experiment is analogous to the conventional Franson-type entanglement experiment where the photons are entangled in position and time. We measure wave-function overlaps for the two photons as high as $94\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}3%$.