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Coherence area measurements of bright entangled twin beams

Ashok Kumar, Hayden Nunley, Alberto M. Marino

Published Jan 31, 2018• 0 citations
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Abstract

Quantum states of light with multiple spatial modes are fundamental for quantum imaging and parallel quantum information processing. Thus, their characterization, which can be achieved through measurements of the coherence area, is an important area of research. We present a comparative study between different measurement techniques for the coherence area of bright entangled twin beams of light. The first one is a direct measurement based on correlation measurements between spatial intensity fluctuations of the twin beams while the second one is based on a noise analysis of different spatial regions in the temporal domain. We generate the bright entangled twin beams with a four-wave mixing process in a hot rubidium vapor cell and capture images of the twin beams with an electron-multiplying charge-coupled-device camera. We show that the time domain measurements, which provides a significantly less complicated measurement scheme, provides an estimate of the size of the coherence area of the same order of magnitude as the direct measurement done in the spatial domain.

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Quantum states of light with multiple spatial modes are fundamental for quantum imaging and parallel quantum information processing. Thus, their characterization, which can be achieved through measurements of the coherence area, is an important area of research. We present a comparative study between different measurement techniques for the coherence area of bright entangled twin beams of light. The first one is a direct measurement based on correlation measurements between spatial intensity fluctuations of the twin beams while the second one is based on a noise analysis of different spatial regions in the temporal domain. We generate the bright entangled twin beams with a four-wave mixing process in a hot rubidium vapor cell and capture images of the twin beams with an electron-multiplying charge-coupled-device camera. We show that the time domain measurements, which provides a significantly less complicated measurement scheme, provides an estimate of the size of the coherence area of the same order of magnitude as the direct measurement done in the spatial domain.
Quantum states of light with multiple spatial modes are fundamental for quantum imaging and parallel quantum information processing. Thus their characterization, which can be achieved through measurements of the coherence area, is an important area of research. We present a comparative study between two different measurement techniques for the coherence area of bright entangled twin beams of light generated with a four-wave mixing process in a hot rubidium vapor cell. The first one provides a direct characterization of the size of the coherence area and is based on correlation measurements between spatial intensity fluctuations of the twin beams with an electron-multiplying charge-coupled-device camera. The second one provides an indirect measure and is based on a noise analysis of different spatial regions of the twin beams in the time domain with a single photodiode. We show that the indirect technique, which can be implemented with a significantly less complicated measurement scheme, gives an estimate of the size of the coherence area consistent with the direct measurement technique performed in the spatial domain.
Two beams of light can be quantum mechanically entangled through correlations of their phase and intensity fluctuations. For a pair of spatially extended image-carrying light fields, the concept of entanglement can be applied not only to the entire images but also to their smaller details. We used a spatially multimode amplifier based on four-wave mixing in a hot vapor to produce twin images that exhibit localized entanglement. The images can be bright fields that display position-dependent quantum noise reduction in their intensity difference or vacuum twin beams that are strongly entangled when projected onto a large range of different spatial modes. The high degree of spatial entanglement demonstrates that the system is an ideal source for parallel continuous-variable quantum information protocols.
The observation of spatial quantum noise reduction, or spatial squeezing, with a large number of photons can lead to a significant advantage in quantum imaging and quantum metrology due to the scaling of the signal-to-noise ratio with the number of photons. Here we present a systematic study of the limiting factors that play a role on the measurement of spatial squeezing with an electron-multiplying charge-coupled device (EMCCD) camera in the limit of bright quantum states of light generated with a four-wave mixing process in an atomic vapor cell. We detect a total number of photons per beam of the order 108{10}^{8}108 in $1\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}\ensuremath{\mu}\mathrm{s}$ pulses, which corresponds to a photon flux per beam of the order of 1014{10}^{14}1014 photons per second. We then investigate the role of different parameters, such as cell temperature, pump power, laser detunings, scattered pump background noise, and timing sequences for the image acquisition with the EMCCD camera, on the level of spatial squeezing. We identify critical parameters to obtain an optimum squeezing level and demonstrate that for bright beams it is essential to acquire images at a rate fast enough to overcome the effect of classical technical noise.
Spatial quantum correlations in the transverse degree of freedom promise to enhance optical resolution, image detection, and quantum communications through parallel quantum information encoding. In particular, the ability to observe these spatial quantum correlations in a single shot will enable such enhancements in applications that require real-time imaging, such as particle tracking and in situ imaging of atomic systems. Here, we report on measurements in the far field that show spatial quantum correlations in single images of bright twin beams with 108{10}^{8}108 photons in a 1-$\ensuremath{\mu}\mathrm{s}$ pulse using an electron-multiplying charge-coupled-device camera. A four-wave mixing process in hot rubidium atoms is used to generate narrowband, bright pulsed twin beams of light. Owing to momentum conservation in this process, the twin beams are momentum correlated, which leads to spatial quantum correlations in the far field. We show around 2 dB of spatial quantum noise reduction with respect to the shot-noise limit. The spatial squeezing is present over a large range of total number of photons in the pulsed twin beams.
Quantum correlations in the spatial domain hold great promise for applications in quantum imaging, quantum cryptography and quantum information processing, owing to the infinite dimensionality of the associated Hilbert space. Here, we present a theoretical investigation, complemented by experimental measurements, of the propagation dynamics of the spatial quantum correlations in bright structured twin beams generated via a four-wave mixing process in a double-ΛΛΛ configuration in atomic vapor. We derive an analytical expression describing the evolution of the spatial quantum correlation distribution from the near field to the far field. To qualitatively support the theoretical predictions, we perform experiments measuring intensity-difference noise between different spatial subregions of the twin beams as they propagate from the near field to the far field. The presence of quantum correlations is manifested as squeezing in the intensity difference noise measurement. With a Gaussian pump, we observe localized correlations in the near field and localized anti-correlations in the far field. In contrast, with a structured Laguerre-Gaussian pump, there is a transition from localized correlations in the near field to delocalized correlations in the far field. The present results offer valuable insights into the fundamental behavior of spatial quantum correlations and open possibilities for potential applications in quantum information, quantum imaging and sensing.
We generate spatially multimode twin beams using 4-wave mixing in a hot atomic vapor in a phase-insensitive traveling-wave amplifier configuration. The far-field coherence area measured at 3.5 MHz is shown to be much smaller than the angular bandwidth of the process and bright twin images with independently quantum-correlated subareas can be generated with little distortion. The available transverse degrees of freedom form a high-dimensional Hilbert space that we use to produce quantum-correlated twin beams with finite orbital angular momentum.