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Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE

One and two-photon quantum interference in a Mach-Zehnder interferometer

Alessandro Trenti, Massimo Borghi, Mattia Mancinelli, Hannah M. Price, Giorgio Fontana, Lorenzo Pavesi

Published Apr 27, 2016• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

A re-visitation of the well known free space Mach Zehnder interferometer is here reported. Coexistence between one-photon and two-photons interference from collinear color entangled photon pairs is investigated. This is seen to arise from an arbitrarily small unbalance in the arm transmittance. The tuning of such asymmetry is reflected in dramatic changes in the coincidence detection, revealing beatings between one particle and two particle interference patterns. Our configuration explores new physics of the real Mach Zehnder interferometer especially useful for quantum optics on a chip, where the guiding geometry forces photons to travel in the same spatial mode.

DOI
10.1117/12.2223061

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A re-visitation of the well known free space Mach Zehnder interferometer is here reported. Coexistence between one-photon and two-photons interference from collinear color entangled photon pairs is investigated. This is seen to arise from an arbitrarily small unbalance in the arm transmittance. The tuning of such asymmetry is reflected in dramatic changes in the coincidence detection, revealing beatings between one particle and two particle interference patterns. Our configuration explores new physics of the real Mach Zehnder interferometer especially useful for quantum optics on a chip, where the guiding geometry forces photons to travel in the same spatial mode.
Abstract A re-visitation of the well known free space Mach-Zehnder interferometer is reported here. The coexistence between one-photon and two-photons interference from collinear color entangled photon pairs is investigated. Thisarises from an arbitrarily small unbalance in the arm transmittance. The tuning of such asymmetry is reflected in dramatic changes in the coincidence detection, revealing beatings between one particle and two particle interference patterns. In particular, the role of the losses and of the intrinsic phase imperfectness of the lossy beamsplitter are explored in a single-port excited Mach-Zehnder interferometer. This configuration is especially useful for quantum optics on a chip, where the guiding geometry forces photons to travel in the same spatial mode.
A pair of light quanta with different colors (155.9-nm difference in center wavelength) generated from parametric down-conversion was injected collinearly into one input port of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer. Coincidence interference behavior was studied over a wide range of optical path differences of the interferometer. A measurement of 75% interference visibility with oscillation of the pump frequency for a large optical path difference of the interferometer (43 cm) is the signature of a quantum two-photon entangled state, which reflects both particle and wave nature of the light quanta in one experiment.
A two-photon interference experiment is presented in which an entangled pair of photons generated from a parametric down-conversion was incident on two input ports of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer. The experiment was carried out using two photon coincidence detection with two detectors at the two output ports of the interferometer. The measured coincidence counts exhibit an interference effect with visibility of 0.75 at simultaneous inputs and 0.38 at inputs with different arrival times according to the degree of photon number entanglement.
The interferometer is one of the most important devices for revealing the nature of light and for precision optical metrology. Although many experiments were performed for probing photon behavior in various configurations, a complete study of photon behavior in a birefringent interferometer has not been performed, to our knowledge. By using an environmental turbulence immune Mach-Zehnder interferometer, we observe tunable photonic beatings by rotating a birefringent crystal versus the temperature of the crystal for both the single photon and two photons. Furthermore, the two-photon interference fringes beat 2 times faster than the single-photon interference fringes. This beating effect is used to determine the thermal dispersion coefficients of the two principal refractive axes with a single measurement: the two-photon interference shows superresolution and high sensitivity. Obvious differences between two-photon and single-photon interference are also revealed in unbalanced situations. In addition, the influence of the photon bandwidth on the beating behaviors that come from polarization-dependent decoherence is also investigated. Our findings will be important for better understanding the behavior of two-photon interference in a birefringent interferometer and for precision optical metrology with quantum enhancement.
The quantum beamsplitter—a two-level system (TLS) coupled to a one-dimensional continuum of electromagnetic modes—is the most elementary version of a beamsplitter that may not only refract and reflect, but also absorb and then reemit a photon. This raises the question of whether a single-photon pulse, once split by a first quantum beamsplitter, could be made to interfere with a second one. Here, we propose and theoretically analyze a quantum Mach–Zehnder interferometer (QMZ) as formed by two concatenated quantum beamsplitters. The distinctive feature of our QMZ is its considerable saturability for a single photon, arising from the broadband nature of the pulse. We show that (i) off-resonant monochromatic photons produce classical interference patterns, whereas (ii) resonant broadband pulses erase these patterns, and that (iii) off-resonant broadband pulses always preserve some degree of interference if the two TLSs are oppositely detuned.
Pairs of 826.8-nm correlated photons, generated by parametrically down-converting 413.4-nm krypton-ion laser light, are directed into a single Mach-Zehnder interferometer such that each photon of the pair enters a different input port. The rate of coincidence at the two output ports displays oscillations (as the path-length difference is swept) with a spatial period equal to the 413-nm wavelength of the pump photons, and with a visibility of 62% when the path-length difference exceeds the coherence length of the individual photon beams. This unequivocally demonstrates the nonclassical and entangled nature of the two-photon state.