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Scientific Reports

Broadband photon pair generation in green fluorescent proteins through spontaneous four-wave mixing

Siyuan Shi, Abu Thomas, Neil Corzo, Prem Kumar, Yu‐Ping Huang, Kim Fook Lee

Published Apr 14, 2016• 7 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Recent studies in quantum biology suggest that quantum mechanics help us to explore quantum processes in biological system. Here, we demonstrate generation of photon pairs through spontaneous four-wave mixing process in naturally occurring fluorescent proteins. We develop a general empirical method for analyzing the relative strength of nonlinear optical interaction processes in five different organic fluorophores. Our results indicate that the generation of photon pairs in green fluorescent proteins is subject to less background noises than in other fluorophores, leading to a coincidence-to-accidental ratio ~145. As such proteins can be genetically engineered and fused to many biological cells, our experiment enables a new platform for quantum information processing in a biological environment such as biomimetic quantum networks and quantum sensors.

DOI
10.1038/srep24344

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Recent studies in quantum biology suggest that quantum mechanics help us to explore quantum processes in biological system. Here, we demonstrate generation of photon pairs through spontaneous four-wave mixing process in naturally occurring fluorescent proteins. We develop a general empirical method for analyzing the relative strength of nonlinear optical interaction processes in five different organic fluorophores. Our results indicate that the generation of photon pairs in green fluorescent proteins is subject to less background noises than in other fluorophores, leading to a coincidence-to-accidental ratio ~145. As such proteins can be genetically engineered and fused to many biological cells, our experiment enables a new platform for quantum information processing in a biological environment such as biomimetic quantum networks and quantum sensors.
Recent development of spectroscopic techniques based on quantum states of light can precipitate many breakthroughs in observing and controlling light-matter interactions in biological materials on a fundamental quantum level. For this reason, the generation of entangled light in biologically produced fluorescent proteins would be promising because of their biocompatibility. Here we demonstrate the generation of polarization-entangled two-photon state through spontaneous four-wave mixing in enhanced green fluorescent proteins. The reconstructed density matrix indicates that the entangled state is subject to decoherence originating from two-photon absorption. However, the prepared state is less sensitive to environmental decoherence because of the protective β-barrel structure that encapsulates the fluorophore in the protein. We further explore the quantumness, including classical and quantum correlations, of the state in the decoherence environment. Our method for photonic entanglement generation may have potential for developing quantum spectroscopic techniques and quantum-enhanced measurements in biological materials.
A continuous-wave (CW) photon-pair source operating in the L-band was successfully realized based on spontaneous four-wave mixing (SFWM) by using short length of a birefringent ZBLAN fiber. A type-III phase-matched SFWM process was utilized by pumping a birefringent ZBLAN fiber with pump photons polarized along the slow axis, where signal and idler photons were generated with polarizations aligned to the vertical axis of the birefringent ZBLAN fiber. The phase-matching curve was calculated, and the joint spectral intensity was analyzed under 1310 nm pumping conditions. Then, we experimentally generated signal and idler photons with center wavelengths of 1117 and 1578 nm using a 1310 nm CW laser as a pump light source and measured their quantum optical properties. The maximum coincidence-to-accidental ratio was calculated to be 22, resulting in a photon-pair brightness of 3.16 × 10 4 pairs/s/nm/mW. The results show the feasibility of using ZBLAN fibers in quantum optics as an efficient platform for generating a quantum light source.