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Physical Review Letters

Turbulence-Free Double-slit Interferometer

Thomas A. Smith, Yanhua H. Shih

Published Feb 8, 2018• 51 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Optical turbulence can be detrimental for optical observations. For instance, atmospheric turbulence may reduce the visibility or completely blur out the interference produced by an interferometer in open air. However, a simple two-photon interference theory based on Einstein's granularity picture of light makes a turbulence-free interferometer possible; i.e., any refraction index, length, or phase variations along the optical paths of the interferometer do not have any effect on its interference. Applying this mechanism, the reported experiment demonstrates a two-photon double-slit interference that is insensitive to atmospheric turbulence. The turbulence-free mechanism and especially the turbulence-free interferometer would be helpful in optical observations that require high sensitivity and stability such as for gravitational-wave detection.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.120.063606

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Optical turbulence can be detrimental for optical observations. For instance, atmospheric turbulence may reduce the visibility or completely blur out the interference produced by an interferometer in open air. However, a simple two-photon interference theory based on Einstein's granularity picture of light makes a turbulence-free interferometer possible; i.e., any refraction index, length, or phase variations along the optical paths of the interferometer do not have any effect on its interference. Applying this mechanism, the reported experiment demonstrates a two-photon double-slit interference that is insensitive to atmospheric turbulence. The turbulence-free mechanism and especially the turbulence-free interferometer would be helpful in optical observations that require high sensitivity and stability such as for gravitational-wave detection.
This article reports a study on a turbulence-free Young's double-slit interferometer. When the environmental turbulence blurs out the classic Young's double-slit interference completely, a two-photon interference pattern is still observable from the measurement of intensity or photon number fluctuation correlation. This two-photon interferometer always produces a turbulence-free interference pattern, when the double-slit interferometer is utilizing both first-order spatially incoherent light and spatially coherent light. This type of two-photon interferometer establishes new capabilities in optical observations and sensing measurements that require high sensitivity and stability.
When a laser beam is incident on a double-slit interferometer without turbulence, the classic Young’s double-slit interference is present in the first-order measurement of the mean photon number (or intensity), while the second-order measurement of photon number fluctuation correlation (or intensity fluctuation correlation) yields a trivial constant. When optical turbulence is introduced, it destroys the classic interference present in the measurement of the photon number; however, two-photon interference appears in the measurement of photon number fluctuation correlation. This interesting observation means that the observed two-photon interference is not only observable through turbulence, i.e., turbulence-free, but also induced by the turbulence itself. Turbulence-free two-photon interference induced by the turbulence itself allows for interferometric sensing through strong turbulence when coherent radiation, such as a laser, is applied.
We construct proper microscopic propositions to consistently capture and explain the interference patterns obtained for electrons and photons, detected individually or otherwise, in one- and two-slit experiments. We propose that for single-photon detections (after time integration), no interference pattern is obtained if one uses non-transparent slit material with slit holes (not diffraction slits). The non-transparent slit material does not permit photons to transmit, reflect internally nor refract. However, the same slit holes can produce the usual interference pattern with electromagnetic waves due to interfering in-phase and out-of-phase light waves. As for the electrons, detected individually or not, partial interference patterns can always be obtained from the two-slit experiment when one of the slits is closed (one at a time), which then can be manually overlapped to produce the complete interference pattern of a double-slit experiment. These new theoretically constructed experimental results for photons and electrons can be readily verified with our current technology using suitable optically non-transparent (for photons) and highly insulating (for electrons) slit materials.
In this article, we propose the two-photon interference imaging based on two-photon interference mechanism with thermal light source. Theoretical and experimental results show that the imaging quality and imaging speed of two-photon interference imaging are comparable to that of classical optical imaging, and much better than that of conventional quantum imaging (ghost imaging). Furthermore, Two-photon interference imaging can effectively overcome the effect of atmospheric turbulence and other harsh optical environments. The physical essence is the inhibition of two-photon interference mechanism on atmospheric turbulence.
To study long-distance free-space quantum communication links, the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) simulated, designed, built, and characterized an atmospheric turbulence simulator (ATS) with the Fried parameter ranging from 0≤ D⁄r_0 <18.2. The ATS was integrated with a non-turbulent path to conduct quantum interferometric experiments such as the heralded single photon g^2 (τ), and the two-photon Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) measurement. We observed that g^2 (0) increased to 1 and that the visibility of the HOM dip significantly decreased in moderate turbulence . Additionally, we tested the reconstruction of polarized-entangled photonic states in various turbulence regimes, and as expected, turbulence weakly affected the reconstruction of the polarization states. This presentation details the experimental setup, results, and analysis of those experiments.
The interferometer is one of the most important devices for revealing the nature of light and for precision optical metrology. Although many experiments were performed for probing photon behavior in various configurations, a complete study of photon behavior in a birefringent interferometer has not been performed, to our knowledge. By using an environmental turbulence immune Mach-Zehnder interferometer, we observe tunable photonic beatings by rotating a birefringent crystal versus the temperature of the crystal for both the single photon and two photons. Furthermore, the two-photon interference fringes beat 2 times faster than the single-photon interference fringes. This beating effect is used to determine the thermal dispersion coefficients of the two principal refractive axes with a single measurement: the two-photon interference shows superresolution and high sensitivity. Obvious differences between two-photon and single-photon interference are also revealed in unbalanced situations. In addition, the influence of the photon bandwidth on the beating behaviors that come from polarization-dependent decoherence is also investigated. Our findings will be important for better understanding the behavior of two-photon interference in a birefringent interferometer and for precision optical metrology with quantum enhancement.