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Workshop on Information Optics

Pushing the limits of single-photon information encoding

Thomas Hummel, Tristan Bernhard Horst Tentrup, Ravitej Uppu, Allard P. Mosk, Pepijn W. H. Pinkse

Published Jul 1, 2016• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Single photons are the carrier of choice in many quantum information processing protocols. Encoding information in a high-dimensional Hilbert space allows for the transfer of more than one bit of information per photon. We use a spatial light modulator (SLM) to direct the single photons to distinct positions of a virtual grid in the Fourier plane of the SLM. An electron-multiplying CCD (EMCCD) was used to detect the position of the photon at the receiver side. After analyzing the data, we conclude that, in contrast to an intensified CCD (ICCD), an EMCCD is not suited to detect the position of one single photon impinging on the camera in a single-shot measurement.

DOI
10.1109/wio.2016.7745593

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Single photons are the carrier of choice in many quantum information processing protocols. Encoding information in a high-dimensional Hilbert space allows for the transfer of more than one bit of information per photon. We use a spatial light modulator (SLM) to direct the single photons to distinct positions of a virtual grid in the Fourier plane of the SLM. An electron-multiplying CCD (EMCCD) was used to detect the position of the photon at the receiver side. After analyzing the data, we conclude that, in contrast to an intensified CCD (ICCD), an EMCCD is not suited to detect the position of one single photon impinging on the camera in a single-shot measurement.
Encoding information in the position of single photons has no known limits, given infinite resources. Using a heralded single-photon source and a spatial light modulator (SLM), we steer single photons to specific positions in a virtual grid on a large-area spatially resolving photon-counting detector (ICCD). We experimentally demonstrate selective addressing any location (symbol) in a 9072 size grid (alphabet) to achieve 10.5 bit of mutual information per detected photon between the sender and receiver. Our results can be useful for very-high-dimensional quantum information processing.
The light produced by parametric down-conversion shows strong spatial entanglement that leads to violations of EPR criteria for separability. Historically, such studies have been performed by scanning a single-element, single-photon detector across a detection plane. Here we show that modern electron-multiplying charge-coupled device cameras can measure correlations in both position and momentum across a multi-pixel field of view. This capability allows us to observe entanglement of around 2,500 spatial states and demonstrate Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen type correlations by more than two orders of magnitude. More generally, our work shows that cameras can lead to important new capabilities in quantum optics and quantum information science. Measuring the entanglement between down-converted photons is central to many quantum optical experiments, and is normally performed by scanning detectors stepwise across a plane. Edgaret al. use a CCD camera to measure the entire entangled light field, finding strong correlations in position and momentum.
We utilize a single-photon sensitive electron multiplying CCD camera as a massively parallel coincidence counting apparatus to study spatial entanglement of photon pairs. This allows rapid measurement of transverse spatial entanglement in a fraction of the time required with traditional point-scanning techniques. We apply this technique to quantum experiments on entangled photon pairs: characterization of the evolution of entanglement upon propagation, and measurement of one- and two-photon portions of the state transmitted through non-unitary (lossy) objects, and quantum phase imaging.
Using an electron multiplying CCD camera we observe both image plane (position) and far field (momentum) correlations between photon pairs produced from spontaneous parametric down-conversion when using a 201 x 201 bi-dimensional array of pixels and a flux of around 0.02 photons/pixel. After background subtraction we characterize the strength of signal and idler correlations in both transverse dimensions by applying entanglement and EPR criteria, showing good agreement with the theoretical predictions. The application of such devices in quantum optics could have a wide range, including quantum computation with spatial degrees of freedom of single photons.
Cameras with single-photon sensitivities can be used to measure the spatial correlations between the photon-pairs that are produced by parametric down-conversion. Even when pumped by a single-mode laser, the signal and idler photons are typically distributed over several thousand spatial modes yet strongly correlated with each other in their position and anti-correlated in their transverse momentum. These spatial correlations enable applications in imaging, sensing, communication, and optical processing. Here we show that, using a photon-number resolving camera, spatial correlations can be observed after only a few 10s of seconds of measurement time, thereby demonstrating comparable performance with previous single photon sensitive camera technologies but with the additional capability to resolve photon-number. Consequently, these photon-number resolving technologies are likely to find wide use in quantum, low-light, imaging systems.