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Quantum Science and Technology

Temporal correlations of spectrally narrowband photon pair sources

Kai-Hong Luo, Harald Herrmann, Christine Silberhorn

Published Apr 6, 2017• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We report on theoretical and experimental investigations of time-resolved cross- and auto-correlation measurements of spectrally narrowband photon pairs generated in sources based on parametric down conversion in resonant waveguide structures. We show that time-resolved measurements provide detailed and useful information about the spectral and modal structure of the bi-photon state. The shape of the cross-correlation function is asymmetric with exponential decays determined by the lifetimes of the signal and idler photons in the cavity. The time-resolved auto-correlation has Lorentzian shape. The measured value convoluted with the detector windows and mode beating can be used to characterise the spectral longitudinal mode behaviour. The temporal width of the auto-correlation function is more than two times longer that the cross-correlation time. This reveals that the spectral bandwidth of the single-photon component is much broader than the spectral width of the two-photon component.

DOI
10.1088/2058-9565/aa6b8e

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We report on theoretical and experimental investigations of time-resolved cross- and auto-correlation measurements of spectrally narrowband photon pairs generated in sources based on parametric down conversion in resonant waveguide structures. We show that time-resolved measurements provide detailed and useful information about the spectral and modal structure of the bi-photon state. The shape of the cross-correlation function is asymmetric with exponential decays determined by the lifetimes of the signal and idler photons in the cavity. The time-resolved auto-correlation has Lorentzian shape. The measured value convoluted with the detector windows and mode beating can be used to characterise the spectral longitudinal mode behaviour. The temporal width of the auto-correlation function is more than two times longer that the cross-correlation time. This reveals that the spectral bandwidth of the single-photon component is much broader than the spectral width of the two-photon component.
Heralded single-photon sources are the most commonly used sources for optical quantum technology applications. There is strong demand for accurate prediction of their spectral features and temporal correlations with ever-increasing precision. This is particularly important in connection with the intrinsically stochastic photon-pair generation process in heralded sources. Here we present a complete theoretical description of the temporal correlation of a signal-idler, signal-signal, and signal-signal-idler coincidences of photons generated by continuous-wave pumped cavity-enhanced spontaneous parametric down-conversion. The theory excellently predicts the measurements, which has been experimentally confirmed in our setup utilizing single-photon detectors with high temporal resolution. This enables us to resolve and analyze the multiphoton correlation functions in great detail.
We investigate the temporal and spectral properties of narrowband photon pairs from a double-Λ-type atomic system of a warm 87Rb atomic ensemble. The temporal properties of the narrowband photons are investigated by measuring their auto-correlation and cross-correlation functions. The spectral measurement of the photon pair is obtained by applying the stimulated emission method. We show that the biphoton spectral waveform with a spectral width of ∼6 MHz corresponds to the biphoton temporal waveform with a temporal width of ∼26 ns. We believe that our results can contribute to the characterization of narrowband photons generated from atomic ensembles and aid in the development of new photonic quantum states generated from atomic systems.
We produce degenerate photon pairs called signal and idler via parametric down-conversion (PDC) in a Fabry-Pérot waveguide resonator having close to a 2GHz bandwidth in the telecom C-band. Our PDC source is based on a type-II periodically-poled Lithium Niobate waveguide with high-reflecting end facets forming the resonator. We measure the strength of the photon-pair correlation between signal and idler after selecting a single resonator mode from the multimode PDC emission. Thereafter, we investigate their sub-nanosecond long pulse shapes, in other words the time bins, with standard photon counting. We find that the time-bin durations vary significantly from each other, which can be predicted by the different optical losses of the cross-polarized signal and idler. Further, we simulate the temporal properties of signal and idler via the Fourier transform of their joint spectral characteristics. Our results deliver empiric insight about the time bins of photon pairs and are relevant for driving future quantum networks at the edge to narrow bandwidths but nevertheless in the pulsed regime.
Two-photon time-frequency entanglement is a valuable resource in quantum information. Resolving the wavepacket of ultrashort pulsed single-photons, however, is a challenge. Here, we demonstrate remote spectral shaping of single photon states and probe the coherence properties of two-photon quantum correlations in the time-frequency domain, using engineered parametric down-conversion (PDC) and a quantum pulse gate (QPG) in nonlinear waveguides. Through tailoring the joint spectral amplitude function of our PDC source we control the temporal mode structure between the generated photon pairs and show remote state-projections over a range of time-frequency mode superpositions.
The ability to manipulate and measure the time-frequency structure of quantum light is useful for information processing and metrology. Measuring this structure is also important when developing quantum light sources with high modal purity that can interfere with other independent sources. Here, we present and experimentally demonstrate a scheme based on intensity interferometry to measure the joint spectral mode of photon pairs produced by spontaneous parametric down-conversion. We observe correlations in the spectral phase of the photons due to chirp in the pump. We show that our scheme can be combined with stimulated emission tomography to quickly measure their mode using bright classical light. Our scheme does not require phase stability, nonlinearities, or spectral shaping and thus is an experimentally simple way of measuring the modal structure of quantum light.
Advancements in the field of compact quantum photonics have enabled researchers to reliably generate and detect spectral and temporal correlated biphotons, opening avenues for diverse applications in quantum technology. Although many routine quantum interferometry and entanglement generation experiments are performed worldwide, only a few studies discuss how different experimental detection and correlation measurement parameters can significantly influence the raw outcomes of these experiments. In this work, we analytically and experimentally elucidate the impact of quantum efficiency and dead time of single-photon detectors, and bin width of the time correlator on the coincidence-to-accidental ratio (CAR) and hence the quantum temporal cross-correlations (gsi2(0)g_{si}^{2}(0)gsi2​(0)) of photon pairs generated at 1560 nm via a type-II MgO:ppLN ridge waveguide-based source. We experimentally achieved a high cross-correlation of up togsi2(0)=∼104g_{si}^{2}(0)=\sim 10^{4}gsi2​(0)=∼104at different detection settings, thus revealing the high-quality of photon-pair correlations, surpassing several state-of-the-art biphoton sources. Additionally, we demonstrate how this analysis anticipates the effect of afterpulsing, temporal distinguishability between signal and idler photons, and temporal resolution of the correlation analysis. We further use this analysis for application in Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interferometry and achieve raw visibility∼99±1 %\sim 99\pm 1\ \%∼99±1 %. To the best of our knowledge, such high raw HOM visibility has not been previously reported in a fiber-based type-II SPDC configuration. This study is important for understanding the quantum source and finding the optimal detection settings to operate it on for its real-time practical implementation in various quantum optical experiments.