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Journal of Physics B Atomic Molecular and Optical Physics

Interference of temporally shaped single photons

Peng Chen, Ce Yang, Zhiqiang Ren, J. F. Chen

Published Mar 1, 2019• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Abstract We observe the single-photon interference by a single-photon source generated from a spontaneous four-wave mixing process in a cold 85 Rb atomic ensemble. By adjusting the coupling and pump power, we obtain two distinguished temporal modes for single photons. Through an unbalance Mach–Zehnder interferometer, these temporally shaped single photons interfere with themselves and produce constructive or destructive interference according to the phase in the single-photon wave packet. The interferometric results of these temporally shaped single photons match well with the theoretical simulation.

DOI
10.1088/1361-6455/ab0bd9

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Abstract We observe the single-photon interference by a single-photon source generated from a spontaneous four-wave mixing process in a cold 85 Rb atomic ensemble. By adjusting the coupling and pump power, we obtain two distinguished temporal modes for single photons. Through an unbalance Mach–Zehnder interferometer, these temporally shaped single photons interfere with themselves and produce constructive or destructive interference according to the phase in the single-photon wave packet. The interferometric results of these temporally shaped single photons match well with the theoretical simulation.
The interference of single photons from independent sources is an essential tool in quantum information processing. However, the interfering of photons with long temporal states in a time-resolved manner has rarely been studied. This is because without transmitting spectral filters or coupling to a cavity mode single photons generated in traditional nonlinear crystals suffer from a short temporal profile below 1 ns. With spectral correlation maintained in the biphotons generated from spontaneous four-wave mixing process in cold atom clouds, here we demonstrate the temporal interference of two frequency-tunable long photons from two independent cold atomic sources. We observe and analyze the interference of frequency-mismatched photons, where the phenomenon of the quantum beat at megahertz separation is displayed. Our paper provides more details for the quantum beat of two independent narrow-band single photons, which may find potential application in frequency-encoded photonic qubits in quantum information processing.
Abstract Since early 1990s, Mach–Zehnder interferometer has been used to investigate the interference of biphoton wave packets. Due to subpicosecond time coherence of biphoton generated by spontaneous parametric downconversion process, some physical processes are ignored in the interferometer, most likely the biphoton time‐domain interference. Here, the two‐photon interference phenomenon based on the Mach–Zehnder interferometer is theoretically studied, where the correlated photon pairs are produced by the four‐wave mixing in atomic system. In particular, the quantum interference effect to effectively control the coherent time of two‐photon by adjusting the input delay is used. In the damped Rabi oscillation regime, two‐photon bunching and antibunching effects are observed. In addition, in the group‐delay regime, the interference between biphoton precursor, slow‐light wave packets and also in between the precursor and the slow‐light wave packets is observed, which had never been reported before. These results may have potential applications in the fields of biphoton shaping and quantum information processing.
The temporal purity of single photons is crucial to the indistinguishability of independent photon sources for the fundamental study of the quantum nature of light and the development of photonic technologies. Currently, the technique for single photons heralded from time-frequency entangled biphotons created in nonlinear crystals does not guarantee the temporal-quantum purity, except using spectral filtering. Nevertheless, an entirely different situation is anticipated for narrow-band biphotons with a coherence time far longer than the time resolution of a single-photon detector. Here we demonstrate temporally pure single photons with a coherence time of 100 ns, directly heralded from the time-frequency entangled biphotons generated by spontaneous four-wave mixing in cold atomic ensembles, without any supplemented filters or cavities. A near-perfect purity and indistinguishability are both verified through Hong-Ou-Mandel quantum interference using single photons from two independent cold atomic ensembles. The time-frequency entanglement provides a route to manipulate the pure temporal state of the single-photon source.
We present experimental demonstrations of two-photon interference involving temporally separated photons within two types of interferometers: a Mach-Zehnder interferometer and a polarization-based Michelson interferometer. The two-photon states are probabilistically prepared in a symmetrically superposed state within the two interferometer arms by introducing a large time delay between two input photons; this state is composed of two temporally separated photons, which are in two different or the same spatial modes. We then observe two-photon interference fringes involving both the Hong-Ou-Mandel interference effect and the interference of path-entangled two-photon states simultaneously in a single interferometric setup. The observed two-photon interference fringes provide simultaneous observation of the interferometric properties of the single-photon and two-photon wavepackets. The observations can also facilitate a more comprehensive understanding of the origins of the interference phenomena arising from spatially bunched/anti-bunched two-photon states comprised of two temporally separated photons within the interferometer arms.
We examine the fourth-order interference properties of two photons at a lossless four-port optical device. The photon pair is represented by a joint single-photon wave-packet state with arbitrary spectral composition. We explicitly determine the coincidence probabilities at the output ports of a beam splitter and a Mach-Zehnder interferometer when the incident wave packet is described by a joint Gaussian spectral distribution and the two photons are incident one at each port of the device. For uncorrelated and distinguishable input photons, the fourth-order interference is readily understood in terms of the particle or wave behavior of each photon acting separately. On the other hand, highly correlated photon pairs, such as those generated from spontaneous parametric down-conversion, exhibit fourth-order interference effects at the output of the interferometer that depend expressly on the joint nature of the photon-pair wave packet, and cannot be described by the particle or wave behavior of either photon.