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Laser & Photonics Review

High‐Resolution Time‐Correlated Single‐Photon Counting Using Electro‐Optic Sampling

Benjamin Crockett, James van Howe, Nicola Montaut, Roberto Morandotti, José Azaña

Published Jul 20, 2022• 25 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Abstract A simple, practical method based on electro‐optic gating is experimentally shown to improve the temporal resolution of single‐photon detection by more than 16 times. Delay times between ultrafast single photons and a reference clock are stretched by a desired programmable sampling gate factor, allowing reconstruction of delay histograms with ≈0.001 photons per pulse to within 60 ps. By transferring the bandwidth of RF electronics to single‐photon counting, complex single‐photon signals with large time‐bandwidth products > 2000 are temporally stretched up so that they can be resolved by slow detectors, irrespective of the quality of the detector instrument response function. This method is also applied to biphotons, in order to reconstruct the 2D histogram of joint detection delays with 15 times better resolution. The phenomenon of nonlocal dispersion, which is not resolvable directly with the slow detectors, is then observable to within the 98 ps level. The proof‐of‐concept demonstration uses off‐the‐shelf commercial fiber‐integrated LiNbO3 modulators and RF electronics, and the method is readily integrable on‐chip and to speeds >100 GHz, offering a practical solution to ultrafast time‐correlated single‐photon counting beyond the research laboratory.

DOI
10.1002/lpor.202100635

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Abstract A simple, practical method based on electro‐optic gating is experimentally shown to improve the temporal resolution of single‐photon detection by more than 16 times. Delay times between ultrafast single photons and a reference clock are stretched by a desired programmable sampling gate factor, allowing reconstruction of delay histograms with ≈0.001 photons per pulse to within 60 ps. By transferring the bandwidth of RF electronics to single‐photon counting, complex single‐photon signals with large time‐bandwidth products > 2000 are temporally stretched up so that they can be resolved by slow detectors, irrespective of the quality of the detector instrument response function. This method is also applied to biphotons, in order to reconstruct the 2D histogram of joint detection delays with 15 times better resolution. The phenomenon of nonlocal dispersion, which is not resolvable directly with the slow detectors, is then observable to within the 98 ps level. The proof‐of‐concept demonstration uses off‐the‐shelf commercial fiber‐integrated LiNbO3 modulators and RF electronics, and the method is readily integrable on‐chip and to speeds >100 GHz, offering a practical solution to ultrafast time‐correlated single‐photon counting beyond the research laboratory.
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Single photons are a natural platform for quantum technologies as they support entanglement in many degrees of freedom and are inherently well protected from a detrimental type of noise called decoherence. In order to fully exploit photons for quantum technologies, it will be necessary to be able to shape, control, and measure their properties in all degrees of freedom: space, time, frequency, and polarization. \n \n The time-frequency degree of freedom of light is of particular interest for quantum information tasks as it supports various encodings, including frequency bins and time bins, and is intrinsically robust for propagation through long-distance fibre links. Applications which harness quantum correlations in this degree of freedom, referred to as energy-time entanglement, include dispersion cancellation and high-dimensional quantum key distribution. However, detection of this entanglement and observation of these effects requires time resolution beyond the capabilities of current photon detectors. Thus, for operations on ultrafast time scales, more powerful and complex methods are required. \n \n In this thesis, we use a nonlinear technique known as optical gating to surpass the limitations in current detectors and measure single photon pairs, improving the time resolution by two orders of magnitude. When a single photon enters a nonlinear medium at the same time as a strong laser pulse, it may upconvert to a higher energy photon. The strong laser pulse effectively acts as an ultrafast shutter or gate and this creates a high resolution snapshot of the photon in time. Optical gating in conjunction with single photon spectrometers then allow us to measure both the spectral and temporal features of photons on subpicosecond time scales. \n \n These high resolution measurements enable us to explore a host of quantum effects which remained previously inaccessible. First, we directly observe energy-time entanglement, analogous to Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky correlations but \\emph{in frequency and time}. Then, with full control over the dispersion of each photon, we observe nonlocal dispersion cancellation on femtosecond time scales. We also explore ultrafast interferometry in the quantum domain by temporally resolving two-photon interference from a Franson interferometer and observe a violation of the CHSH-Bell inequality. Finally, we show that, using these measurements, it is possible to reconstruct a two-photon energy-time entangled state. Such measurement capabilities will be essential to precisely control both the spectral and temporal shape of entangled photons and to develop new applications in quantum state engineering.
The nonclassical light sources, such as frequency-time entangled photons, are anticipated to offer significant benefits for emerging quantum optical sensing or spectroscopic measurements and manifest on ultrafast time scales (sub-ps to fs). However, the constrained time resolution (ns to ps) of photon-counting detectors poses challenges in comprehensively characterizing their detailed properties on ultrafast time scales. Therefore, we present a novel asynchronous optical sampling (ASOPS) technique utilizing two-color optical frequency combs to demonstrate highly precise and sensitive ultrafast time-resolved cross-correlation measurements at the single-photon level. By employing photon counting statistics, this method successfully reconstructed the picosecond pulse width cross-correlation waveforms at extremely low power level (<1 photon per pulse), while effectively suppressing the residual temporal jitter between the two combs via optically triggered averaging using asynchronous optical sampling of combs. The use of repetition frequency stabilized distinct-wavelength pulses allowed for the effective suppression of strong background light from the pump through spectral filtering, achieving single-photon sensitivity. Subsequently, we parametrically down converted the frequency doubled light from the Er comb in the nonlinear ppKTP waveguide to generate quantum entangled photons at telecom band. A 9.04% Klyshko efficiency with a photon pair generation rate of 0.98 MHz/mW was obtained using heralding detection. Employing the established ASOPS technique to the generated photon pairs enabled the realization of ultrafast time-resolved and quantum mechanical correlation measurements. This paves the way for a versatile and comprehensive manipulation of quantum-entangled photon pairs in the time-domain, with potential applications in ultrafast optical quantum technology and ultrashort fluorescence measurements.
We demonstrate a new biphoton manipulation and characterization technique based on electro-optic intensity modulation and time shifting. By applying fast modulation signals with a sharply peaked cross-correlation to each photon from an entangled pair, it is possible to measure temporal correlations with significantly higher precision than that attainable using standard single-photon detection. Low-duty-cycle pulses and maximal-length sequences are considered as modulation functions, reducing the time spread in our correlation measurement by a factor of five compared to our detector jitter. With state-of-the-art electro-optic components, we expect the potential to surpass the speed of any single-photon detectors currently available.