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Chinese Optics Letters

Interfering single photons retreived from collective atomic excitations in two dense cold-atom clouds

Rong Cao, Rong Wen, Zhenjie Gu, Zhiguang Han, Peng Qian, and Jiefei Chen and Jiefei Chen

Published Jan 1, 2016• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We report the Hong–Ou–Mandel (HOM) interference, with visibility of 91%, produced from two independent single photons retrieved from collective atomic excitations in two separate cold-atom clouds with high optical depths of 90. The high visibility of the HOM dip is ascribed to the pure single photon in the Fock state that was generated from a dense-cold-atom cloud pumping by a short pulse. The visibility is always the same regardless of the time response of the single-photon detectors. This result experimentally shows that the single photons retrieved are in a separable temporal state with their idler photons.

DOI
10.3788/col201614.080201

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We report the Hong–Ou–Mandel (HOM) interference, with visibility of 91%, produced from two independent single photons retrieved from collective atomic excitations in two separate cold-atom clouds with high optical depths of 90. The high visibility of the HOM dip is ascribed to the pure single photon in the Fock state that was generated from a dense-cold-atom cloud pumping by a short pulse. The visibility is always the same regardless of the time response of the single-photon detectors. This result experimentally shows that the single photons retrieved are in a separable temporal state with their idler photons.
We present Hong-Ou-Mandel interference of single photons generated via two different physical processes by two independent atomic systems: scattering by a single atom, and parametric generation via four-wave mixing in a cloud of cold atoms. Without any spectral filtering, we observe a visibility of V = 62± 4%. After correcting for accidental coincidences, we obtain V = 93± 6%. The observed interference demonstrates the compatibility of the two sources, forming the basis for an efficient quantum interface between different physical systems.
We present Hong-Ou-Mandel interference of single photons generated via two different physical processes by two independent atomic systems: scattering by a single atom, and parametric generation via four-wave mixing in a cloud of cold atoms. Without any spectral filtering, we observe a visibility of $V=62\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}4%$. After correcting for accidental coincidences, we obtain $V=93\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}6%$. The observed interference demonstrates the compatibility of the two sources, forming the basis for an efficient quantum interface between different physical systems.
Hong-Ou-Mandel interference between independent sources is a fundamental primitive of many quantum communication and computation protocols. We present a study of the Hong-Ou-Mandel interference of single photons generated via two different physical processes by two independent atomic systems: scattering by a single atom, and parametric generation via four-wave mixing in a cloud of cold atoms. By controlling the coherence time and central frequency of the heralded single photons generated by four-wave mixing we observe quantum beat and a varying degree of interference.
A high visibility Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference between two independently prepared photons plays an important role in various photonic quantum information processing. In a standard HOM experiment using photons generated by pulse-pumped spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC), larger detection time windows than the coherence time of photons have been employed for measuring the HOM visibility and/or drawing the HOM dip. If large amounts of stray photons continuously exist within the detection time windows, employing small detection time windows is favorable for reducing the effect of background noises. Especially, such a setup is helpful for the HOM experiment using continuous wave (cw)-pumped SPDC and the time-resolved coincidence measurement. Here we argue that the method for determining the HOM visibility used in the previous cw experiments tends to suffer from distortion arising from biased contribution of the background noises. We then present a new method with unbiased treatment of the cw backgrounds. By using this method, we experimentally demonstrate a high visibility HOM interference of two heralded telecom photons independently generated by SPDC with employing cw pump light. An observed HOM visibility is 0.87 ± 0.04, which is as high as those observed by using pulse-pumped SPDC photons.
Abstract Quantum repeater networks require independent absorptive quantum memories capable of storing and retrieving indistinguishable photons to perform high-repetition entanglement swapping operations. The ability to perform these coherent operations at room temperature is of prime importance for the realization of scalable quantum networks. We perform Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference between photonic polarization states and single-photon-level pulses stored and retrieved from two sets of independent room-temperature quantum memories. We show that the storage and retrieval of polarization states from quantum memories does not degrade the HOM visibility for few-photon-level polarization states in a dual-rail configuration. For single-photon-level pulses, we measure the HOM visibility with various levels of background in a single polarization, single-rail QM, and investigate its dependence on the signal-to-background ratio. We obtain an HOM visibility of 43%, compared to the 48% no-memory limit of our set-up. These results allow us to estimate a 33% visibility for polarization qubits under the same conditions. These demonstrations lay the groundwork for future applications using large-scale memory-assisted quantum networks.
Heralded single photons (HSPs) generated by spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) are useful resource to achieve various photonic quantum information processing. Given a large-scale experiment which needs multiple HSPs, increasing the generation rate with suppressing higher-order pair creation is desirable. One of the promising ways is to use a pump laser with a GHz-order repetition rate. In such a high repetition rate regime, however, single-photon detectors can only partially identify the pulses. Hence, we develop a simple model to consider that effect on the spectral purity, and experimentally demonstrate a high-visibility Hong-Ou-Mandel interference between two independent HSPs generated by SPDC with 3.2 GHz-repetition-rate mode-locked pump pulses. The observed visibility of 0.88(3) is in good agreement with our theoretical model.