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Physics World

Twin beams point to hypersensitive detection

E. Giacobino

Published Jan 1, 1991• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In recent years physicists have had significant success in manipulating the quantum fluctuations of light, which originate in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. They have produced squeezed light, that is light with reduced noise in its intensity or in its phase, and “twin beams” – two light beams having correlated intensity fluctuations. A new world record in twin-beam correlation has now been set by Orhan Aytur and Prem Kumar at Northwestern University, USA (Phys. Rev. Lett. (1990) 65 1551).

DOI
10.1088/2058-7058/4/1/25

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In recent years physicists have had significant success in manipulating the quantum fluctuations of light, which originate in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. They have produced squeezed light, that is light with reduced noise in its intensity or in its phase, and “twin beams” – two light beams having correlated intensity fluctuations. A new world record in twin-beam correlation has now been set by Orhan Aytur and Prem Kumar at Northwestern University, USA (Phys. Rev. Lett. (1990) 65 1551).
As a direct result of the quantum nature of electromagnetic radiation, all forms of light exhibit inherent and unavoidable random fluctuations. Because these fluctuations reveal information about the nature of light and the underlying processes that generate it, they have received considerable attention since the time of Einstein. But they are also a source of noise that limits the accuracy with which information can be transmitted by a beam of light. Although experiments often still struggle with instrumental noise, some are quickly approaching the measurement limits set by the quantum-statistical nature of light. With the help of new techniques to “squeeze” the uncertainty of light, researchers can now conduct experiments with greater precision than possible with laser light. The generation of various forms of squeezed light in recent years has raised hopes for its application to such diverse areas as gravity-wave detection based on optical interferometry and reduced-error lightwave communications.
The signal and idler beams from a non-degenerate, above threshold, optical parametric oscillator have a strong quantum correlation, which are called twin beams. This correlation arises from the simultaneous generation of the signal and idler photons in the form of twin pairs of photons through the parametric down conversion, and the generated twin beams have exactly the same photon statistics. As a result, the fluctuations on the difference between the intensities of the twin beams are reduced with respect to the shot noise limit, that is, intensity-difference squeezing. We give a comprehensive overview of the generation of twin beams using the optical parametric oscillator, and the applications exploiting the quantum correlation of twin beams are presented.
We analyze in detail a system of two interferometers aimed at the detection of extremely faint phase fluctuations. The idea behind is that a correlated phase-signal like the one predicted by some phenomenological theory of Quantum Gravity (QG) could emerge by correlating the output ports of the interferometers, even when in the single interferometer it confounds with the background. We demonstrated that injecting quantum light in the free ports of the interferometers can reduce the photon noise of the system beyond the shot-noise, enhancing the resolution in the phase-correlation estimation. Our results confirm the benefit of using squeezed beams together with strong coherent beams in interferometry, even in this correlated case. On the other hand, our results concerning the possible use of photon number entanglement in twin beam state pave the way to interesting and probably unexplored areas of application of bipartite entanglement and, in particular, the possibility of reaching surprising uncertainty reduction exploiting new interferometric configurations, as in the case of the system described here.