Transmission and Detection of Squeezed States of Light through an Optical Fiber with a Real-time True Local Oscillator

Abstract

Transmission and accurate detection of squeezed states of light will play a central role in the future quantum internet, where quantum cryptography, communication and computation will coexist in an organic system. Their coherent detection has recently proven to be crucial for photonics-based quantum computing [1] , and to provide improvements in continuous variables quantum key distribution [2] [6] and quantum sensing [3] . Often when measuring a quantum state through coherent detection, the local oscillator field is transmitted along with the signal; however, in realistic long-distance optical fiber transmissions, where the needed local oscillator optical power increases exponentially with the distance, the system’s performance deteriorates due to nonlinear Brillouin scattering, and wavelength multiplexing schemes may be needed to avoid the issue. Moreover, transmitting a local oscillator opens security loopholes in quantum key distribution systems, where an eavesdropper can defy the security assessment from the trusted parties by gaining control over the local oscillator [4] . It is therefore very important to design coherent detection schemes that make use of independent local oscillators. We demonstrate the transmission single-mode squeezed light at 1550 nm wavelength through single-mode optical fibers (10 m and 10 km lengths) and its homodyne detection, using an independent local oscillator and a real-time phase-control system. Fig. 1a depicts the implemented physical setup: 1550 nm squeezed light is generated through spontaneous parametric downconversion [5] , couples into a single-mode optical fiber and propagates towards the homodyne detector for quadrature measurement. Real-time phase control consists in detecting the interference between a 40 MHz single-sideband pilot mode -phase-locked to the downconverted pump- and the local oscillator, estimating their instantaneous phase difference and implementing a fast and broad FPGA-based phase control on the local oscillator. As shown in Fig. 1b and 1c, with the presented scheme it was possible to steadily measure up to 3.6 dB of squeezing after a 10 m optical fiber transmission, and up to 1.5 dB of squeezing after a 10 km fiber transmission, with similar performance in terms of phase error and control stability. The presented system is simple, robust and cost-effective, and it will represent a standard class of techniques to detect not only squeezed states of light, but any arbitrary quantum state of light, including Schrödinger cat states, highly useful in quantum computation and error correction.