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Journal of the Optical Society of America A

A gain criterion for the improvement of detection tasks with sub-Poissonian light

Julien Fade, Philippe Réfrégier, Nicolas Treps, Claude Fabre

Published Apr 7, 2009• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

Based on a standard binomial model of sub-Poissonian photocounting statistics, we analyze the discrimination performance between the two possibilities that light has been potentially absorbed or not. For that purpose, we study with numerical simulations the behavior of different information-theory-based measures of the contrast and show that the Chernoff measure allows one to obtain a useful contrast characterization that has simple physical interpretation and that helps in analyzing the benefit of using sub-Poissonian light to improve detection tasks.

DOI
10.1364/josaa.26.001139

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Based on a standard binomial model of sub-Poissonian photocounting statistics, we analyze the discrimination performance between the two possibilities that light has been potentially absorbed or not. For that purpose, we study with numerical simulations the behavior of different information-theory-based measures of the contrast and show that the Chernoff measure allows one to obtain a useful contrast characterization that has simple physical interpretation and that helps in analyzing the benefit of using sub-Poissonian light to improve detection tasks.
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A great deal of effort has been devoted during the last decade to the theory of nonclassical states of the radiation field. From a practical point of view some of the most interesting predictions of these theories concern the generation of light with sub-Poissonian photon counting statistics for which Such light is evidently less noisy than laser radiation with obvious implications for the improved performance of optical systems. When the temporal autocorrelation function of the photon counts increases as the delay time increases from zero the light is also said to be antibunched.
Using a binomial model of sub-Poissonian light statistics, we determine and analyze the Cramer–Rao lower bound for the estimation of the contrast between two sub-Poissonian light beams. The study of this bound shows that the optimal precision of contrast estimation can be maximally improved in proportion to the Fano factor of the sub-Poissonian light sources in comparison with standard coherent light. Numerical simulations show that a simple contrast estimator can reach this bound. The general results obtained are analyzed for two practical situations involving contrast estimation between two intensity levels of a single sub-Poissonian beam.
Squeezed light is expected to enable new quantum metrology and quantum computation applications, but the very high degree of experimental control required in practice places severe demands on the physical devices used to generate it. As ultrafast squeezed light sources are reaching an unprecedented degree of brightness and modal control, there is a strong interest in developing methods for their experimental characterization and theoretical understanding. In this thesis, we demonstrate both a new application and a new characterization technique for pulsed squeezed light. In the first part of the thesis, we present a new metrological application of pulsed squeezed light: quantum-enhanced label-free nonlinear microscopy. Stimulated emission microscopy (SEM) is a state-of-the-art pump-probe microscopy technique whose sensitivity is ultimately limited by shot noise in the probe beam. We propose to overcome this fundamental limitation by using a sub-Poissonian probe generated via optical parametric amplification. We demonstrate an intensity-squeezed sub-picosecond pulsed probe, and a simple stimulated emission microscope. Using this squeezed probe, sub-Poissonian statistics are observed in the SEM signal. After this proof-of-principle experiment, we aim to provide an improved design for a source of intensity-squeezed light. First, we develop a theoretical framework to simulate the photon statistics of a general sub-Poissonian source, considering pulsed and focused pump and seed fields in a unified spatio-temporal description. Next, we use this framework to suggest possible improvements to our previous squeezed probe. In the second part of this thesis, we provide new theoretical and experimental tools to analyze the high gain regime of pulsed spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC). We study a waveguided source capable of generating twin-beams with tens of photons in a single spatio-temporal mode. We develop a framework to efficiently simulate SPDC for an arbitrary nonlinear gain, including the effect of parasitic nonlinearities such as self-phase modulation (SPM) of the pump and cross-phase modulation (XPM) between pump and twin-beams. We experimentally characterize our source using a new technique based on stimulated difference-frequency generation (DFG). In a type-II down-conversion process, we measure the frequency generation produced not only in the orthogonal polarization to the seeding beam, but also in its same polarization, which we interpret as cascaded difference-frequency generation. We argue that the additional information obtained in this measurement allows for a self-referenced estimation of the squeezing gain. Using these measurements, we accurately fit our theoretical model, revealing that, in the high gain regime, parasitic nonlinearities strongly affect the spectral structure of the twin-beams. We propose a simple strategy to reduce the impact of these nonlinearities on the modal structure of SPDC.