Multi-Spatial-Mode Noiseless Optical Amplifier

Franck Ferreyrol, Rémi Blandino, Marco Barbieri +3 more

R. A. Brewster, J. D. Franson

Alberto M. Marino, Neil Corzo, K. M. Jones +1 more

We implement a noiseless optical amplifier through a phase-sensitive four-wave mixing process in rubidium vapor and show that it does not significantly degrade the signal-to-noise ratio. Preliminary results show its multi-spatial-mode nature.

Neil Corzo, Alberto M. Marino, K. M. Jones +1 more

We implement a noiseless optical amplifier using a phase-sensitive four-wave mixing process in rubidium vapor. We observe performance near the quantum limit for this type of amplifier over a range of experimental parameters and show that the noise figure is always better than would be obtained with a phase-insensitive amplifier with the same gain. Additionally, we observe that the amplifier supports hundreds of spatial modes, making it possible to amplify complex two-dimensional spatial patterns with less than a 10% degradation of the input signal-to-noise ratio for gains up to 4.6. To confirm the multimode character of the amplifier, we study the noise figure as a function of spatially-varying losses. Additionally, we investigate the spatial resolution of the amplifier and show that it supports a range of spatial frequencies from 1.3 to more than 35 line pairs per millimeter.

Kumar

Juan Ariel Levenson, Izo I. Abram, Kamel Bencheikh +1 more