A new scheme for interferometric measurements that uses squeezed light produced in an optical fiber ring is proposed. Guided-acoustic-wave Brillouin scattering noise is suppressed by cancellation of the phase fluctuations caused by this scattering in two consecutive pulses that are pi phase shifted with respect to each other.
Thermally excited transverse phonons in glass fibers generate guided acoustic wave Brillouin scattering (GAWBS) which afflicts the propagating light with phase and polarization noise. This excess noise is a major limitation for fiber-based squeezing sources as well as for the transmission of quantum information through fibers. In order to achieve quantum states of high quality it is therefore important to reduce the harmful effect of GAWBS. The thermal nature of GAWBS naturally allows for a reduction by cooling the fiber. Alternatively, subtracting the correlated noise of two closely spaced pulses leads to a cancellation. These methods, however, are inconvenient for fiber-based squeezing sources and inapplicable in practical quantum information transmission systems.
We give a quantum theoretical analysis of squeezed light generation via nondegenerate four-wave mixing in an optical fiber. The medium is modeled by an ensemble of anharmonic oscillators and loss is included. We include the coupling to acoustic phonons which gives rise to guided acoustic wave Brillouin scattering (GAWBS). The GAWBS introduces random noise which destroys the squeezing at room temperatures. By cooling the fiber to temperatures ~2 K the GAWBS is substantially reduced and the observation of squeezing becomes possible. A comparison is made with the recent experimental results of Levenson et al.1, 2 A scheme to suppress the GAWBS at room temperatures using a two-frequency pump and difference detection is analyzed and the conditions in which good squeezing results are determined.
Dispersive optical bistability with a threshold cw input power of approximately 10 mW has been observed in a single-mode fiber-optic ring resonator. Light is coupled in and out of the resonator by a single-mode-fiber variable directional coupler. A fiber-optic Faraday isolator is incorporated into the ring, thus increasing the threshold for stimulated Brillouin oscillation by a factor of 100 and permitting other weaker nonlinear effects such as bistability to be observed. Phase-sensitive amplification and deamplification (squeezing) of classical time-stationary noise is demonstrated and shown to be in agreement with the theory of squeezed-state generation in such a nonlinear fiber ring resonator. Light scattering by elastic eigenmodes of the fiber (guided-acoustic-wave Brillouin scattering, GAWBS) adds noise to light circulating in the resonator and obscures the observation of squeezed quantum fluctuations. The properties of this GAWBS scattering are investigated and compared with theory.
Squeezing of 100 ps pulses from a Nd:YAG laser operating at 1.3 μm in a fiber ring has led to a reduction of noise 5 dB below the shot noise level. This reduction occurs in a spectral window between 40 and 90 kHz, a frequency range particularly convenient for instrumentation. Guided acoustic wave Brillouin scattering (GAWBS) was found to be the process limiting our squeezing to 5 dB. The G AWBS measurements will be presented. In the meantime promising ways of reducing the GA WBS have been found and will be described. Fiber ring squeezing permits the reuse of the pump as local oscillator (in principle in full if Faraday rotators are used). A simple system of a fiber ring squeezer with an interferometer in cascade is being constructed to perform a phase measurement below the standard quantum limit. Experimental results will be presented.