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New Journal of Physics

Interferometric measurement of the helical mode of a single photon

Enrique J. Galvez, Laura E. Coyle, Eric G. Johnson, Benjamin J. Reschovsky

Published May 12, 2011• 22 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We present measurements of the helical mode of single photons and do so by sending heralded photons through a Mach–Zehnder interferometer that prepares the light in a helical mode with topological charge one, and interferes it with itself in the fundamental non-helical mode. Masks placed after the interferometer were used to diagnose the amplitude and phase of the mode of the light. Auxiliary measurements verified that the light was in a non-classical state. The results are in good agreement with theory. The experiments demonstrate in a direct way that single photons carry the entire spatial helical-mode information.

DOI
10.1088/1367-2630/13/5/053017

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We present measurements of the helical mode of single photons and do so by sending heralded photons through a Mach–Zehnder interferometer that prepares the light in a helical mode with topological charge one, and interferes it with itself in the fundamental non-helical mode. Masks placed after the interferometer were used to diagnose the amplitude and phase of the mode of the light. Auxiliary measurements verified that the light was in a non-classical state. The results are in good agreement with theory. The experiments demonstrate in a direct way that single photons carry the entire spatial helical-mode information.
We present a study of the imaging of the interference of spatial-helical modes of single photons. This work includes a mathematical treatment that accounts for the direction of propagation and spatial mode degrees of freedom in the situation where light travels through an interferometer that prepares the light in distinct spatial modes and makes them interfere. We present results of the interference at the single photon level of the spatialhelical modes with topological charge 1 and 0. The results are consistent with the expectation that each photon carries the entire spatial mode information.
Quantitative characterization of the spatial structure of single photons is essential for free-space quantum communication and quantum imaging. We introduce an interferometric technique that enables the complete characterization of a two-dimensional probability amplitude of a single photon. Importantly, in contrast to methods that use a reference photon for the phase measurement, our technique relies on a single photon interfering with itself. Our setup comprises of a heralded single-photon source with an unknown spatial phase and a modified Mach-Zehnder interferometer with a spatial filter in one of its arms. The spatial filter removes the unknown spatial phase and the filtered beam interferes with the unaltered beam passing through the other arm of the interferometer. We experimentally confirm the feasibility of our technique by reconstructing the spatial phase of heralded single photons using the lowest order interference fringes. This technique can be applied to the characterization of arbitrary pure spatial states of single photons.
Over the past several decades, single photon-based path interference in double-slit experiment has been well demonstrated for the particle nature of photons satisfying complementarity theory, where the quantum mechanical interpretation of the single photon interference fringe is given by Born rule for complex amplitudes in measurements. Unlike most conventional methods using entangled photon pairs, here, a classical coherent light source is directly applied for the proof of the same self-interference phenomenon. Instead of double slits, we use a Mach-Zehnder interferometer as usual, where the resulting self-interference fringe of coherent single photons is exactly the same as that of the coherent photon ensemble of the laser, demonstrating that the classical coherence based on the wave nature is rooted in the single photon self-interference. This unexpected result seems to contradict our common understanding of decoherence phenomena caused by multi-wave interference among bandwidth distributed photons in coherence optics.
We have measured the phase structure of a glass wedge with single photons and biphotons in a Mach-Zehnder interferometer using parametric downconverted light from a Hong-Ou-Mandel particle interferometer as the source. By scanning the wedge through the focus of a microscope objective we find a doubling of the period of the interference pattern in the coincidence counts for biphotons compared to the single-photon experiment. We compare our measurement setup with classical ones and discuss some of the problems of superresolution in quantum lithography.
We describe a series of experiments used in a sophomore-level quantum physics course that are designed to provide students with a hands-on introduction to quantum mechanics. By measuring correlations, we demonstrate that a helium-neon laser produces results consistent with a classical model of light. We then demonstrate that a light source derived from a spontaneous parametric down-conversion process produces results that can only be described using a quantum theory of light, thus providing a (nearly) single-photon source. These single photons are then sent into a Mach–Zehnder interferometer, and interference fringes are observed whenever the path of the photons cannot be determined. These experiments are investigated theoretically using straightforward quantum-mechanical calculations.