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Physical Review Letters

Sub-shot-noise correlation of total photon number using macroscopic twin pulses of light

D. T. Smithey, M. Beck, Michael Scott Belsley, Michael G. Raymer

Published Nov 2, 1992• 77 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We have measured whole-pulse photon statistics of macroscopic twin pulses of light generated by coherently seeding a two-mode optical parametric amplifier equally in each mode. We are able to produce 300 ps, near-transform-limited twin pulses (\ensuremath{\sim}${10}^{6}$ photons) with a difference photon number having a variance measured to be 73% below the shot-noise level. We have measured probability distributions of the photoelectron difference number, which are the only photoelectron distributions in the macroscopic regime which cannot be explained using standard semiclassical detection theory.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.69.2650

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We have measured whole-pulse photon statistics of macroscopic twin pulses of light generated by coherently seeding a two-mode optical parametric amplifier equally in each mode. We are able to produce 300 ps, near-transform-limited twin pulses (\ensuremath{\sim}106{10}^{6}106 photons) with a difference photon number having a variance measured to be 73% below the shot-noise level. We have measured probability distributions of the photoelectron difference number, which are the only photoelectron distributions in the macroscopic regime which cannot be explained using standard semiclassical detection theory.
We demonstrate sub-shot-noise photon-number correlations in a (temporal) multimode mesoscopic ($\ensuremath{\sim}{10}^{3}$ detected photons) twin beam produced by picosecond-pulsed spontaneous nondegenerate parametric down-conversion. We have separately detected the signal and idler distributions of photons collected in twin coherence areas and found that the variance of the photon-count difference goes below the shot-noise limit by 3.25dB3.25\phantom{\rule{0.3em}{0ex}}\mathrm{dB}3.25dB. The number of temporal modes contained in the twin beam, as well as the size of the twin coherence areas, depends on the pump intensity. Our scheme is based on spontaneous down-conversion and thus does not suffer from limitations due to the finite gain of the parametric process. Twin beams are also used to demonstrate the conditional preparation of a nonclassical (sub-Poissonian) state.
We demonstrate, by direct measurement of the number of photons in signal and idler, that the twin-beam of light produced by ps-pulsed spontaneous parametric downconversion is endowed with sub-shot-noise photon-number correlations in a mesoscopic intensity regime (more than 1000 detected photons). The noise reduction, calculated from the variance of the difference in the numbers of detected-photons, resulted to be 3.25 dB below the shot-noise level. From experimental data we can recover joint photon-number distribution and a negative-valued joint signal-idler quasi-distributions of integrated intensities, which demonstrates the nonclassical character of the generated field.
We investigated statistical fluctuations in the numbers of photons contained in the correlated twin photon beams generated by an optical parametric process. The coincidence between the signal- and idler-photoelectron pulses from a pair of avalanche photo-diodes was measured. The measured fluctuation in the number of signal-photons coinciding with idler-photons was equal to the standard deviation of a binomial distribution and was smaller than that of a Poisson distribution. We determined that even when the quantum efficiency of the photon detectors was much lower than unity, the uncertainty in the number of photons obtained with the twin photon beams was smaller, by a factor of 1/√2, than that with a classical light beam.
Recently, we have observed as much as 7 dB of quantum-noise reduction in the direct difference detection of twin-beam signal and idler outputs from a traveling-wave optical parametric amplifier (OPA).1 The OPA, which consists of a type-II phase-matched KTiOPO4 crystal, is pumped by the second harmonic of a mode-locked and Q-switched Nd:YAG laser. Here we describe an experiment in which we used these twin-beam pulses to improve on the optimal (shot-noise-limited) direct-detection signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) that can be achieved with coherent-state pulses of light of the same peak power.