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Physical Review Applied

Programmable Spatiotemporal Quantum Parametric Mode Sorter

Malvika Garikapati, Santosh Kumar, He Zhang, Yong Meng Sua, Yu‐Ping Huang

Published Apr 24, 2023• 11 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Photons are ideal information carriers for sensing, communication, and computing. In principle, a single photon can carry much information in its spatiotemporal modes; the challenge is to read it out, as linear optical elements are not sensitive to the subtle differences among those modes. This study demonstrates a nonlinear-optical approach in which a single pass through a LiNiO${}_{3}$ waveguide can separate photons according to their detailed spatiotemporal profiles or their superpositions, even if they completely overlap with each other. This provides access to photons' large Hilbert spaces, pointing to applications in free-space quantum communication, computing, and sensing.

DOI
10.1103/physrevapplied.19.044070

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Photons are ideal information carriers for sensing, communication, and computing. In principle, a single photon can carry much information in its spatiotemporal modes; the challenge is to read it out, as linear optical elements are not sensitive to the subtle differences among those modes. This study demonstrates a nonlinear-optical approach in which a single pass through a LiNiO3{}_{3}3​ waveguide can separate photons according to their detailed spatiotemporal profiles or their superpositions, even if they completely overlap with each other. This provides access to photons' large Hilbert spaces, pointing to applications in free-space quantum communication, computing, and sensing.
We experimentally demonstrate a programmable parametric mode sorter of high-dimensional signals in a composite spatiotemporal Hilbert space through mode-selective quantum frequency up-conversion. As a concrete example and with quantum communication applications in mind, we consider the Laguerre-Gaussian and Hermite-Gaussian modes as the spatial and temporal state basis for the signals, respectively. By modulating the spatiotemporal profiles of the up-conversion pump, we demonstrate the faithful selection of single photons in those modes and their superposition modes. Our results show an improvement in the quantum mode-sorting performance by coupling the up-converted light into a single-mode fiber and/or operating the upconversion at the edge of phase matching. By optimizing pump temporal profiles only, we achieve more than 12 dB extinction for mutually unbiased basis (MUB) sets of the spatiotemporal modes. This fully programmable and efficient system could serve as a viable resource for quantum communications, quantum computation, and quantum metrology.
We demonstrate a high-dimensional mode-sorter for single photons based on a multi-output quantum pulse gate, which we can program to switch between different temporal-mode encodings including pulse modes, frequency bins, time bins, and their superpositions. This device can facilitate practical realizations of quantum information applications such as high-dimensional quantum key distribution and thus enables secure communication with enhanced information capacity. We characterize the mode-sorter through a detector tomography in 3 and 5 dimensions and find a fidelity up to 0.958 ± 0.030 at the single-photon level.
Photonic circuits are central to classical and quantum information processing. While integrated technologies dominate, free-space architectures are emerging as attractive alternatives, offering broad bandwidth and direct manipulation of optical modes without confinement in waveguides. A key challenge for scalability lies in circuit depth, as the number of layers manipulating the optical field typically grows with the system size. Here, we introduce a programmable free-space photonic platform that implements translation-invariant, high-dimensional unitary transformations using only three layers. Information is encoded in structured light modes defined by circular polarization and quantized transverse momenta, and processed with spatial light modulators interleaved with half-wave plates. We implement unitaries that are equivalent to quantum walks over up to 30 time steps, in one- and two-dimensional lattices, distributing a single input mode across more than 7,000 outputs, where conventional approaches would require tens or hundreds of layers. The platform supports diverse quantum walk dynamics, including disorder, synthetic gauge fields, and topological effects, previously explored only in separate experiments. Using coincidence detection with a time-tagging camera, we show compatibility with quantum optics protocols and provide examples of quantum walks of heralded single photons. These results contribute to establishing free-space optical processors as promising resources for high-dimensional quantum simulation and scalable optical information processing.
The Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) modes constitute a complete basis set for representing the transverse structure of a paraxial photon field in free space. Earlier workers have shown how to construct a device for sorting a photon according to its azimuthal LG mode index, which describes the orbital angular momentum (OAM) carried by the field. In this paper we propose and demonstrate a mode sorter based on the fractional Fourier transform to efficiently decompose the optical field according to its radial profile. We experimentally characterize the performance of our implementation by separating individual radial modes as well as superposition states. The reported scheme can, in principle, achieve unit efficiency and thus can be suitable for applications that involve quantum states of light. This approach can be readily combined with existing OAM mode sorters to provide a complete characterization of the transverse profile of the optical field.
Orbital angular momentum (OAM) of photons has both classical and quantum applications due to its feature of optical vortex and infinite dimension. OAM discrimination is one of the basic problems, which has been paid much attention recently. Here we present an interferometer method in which a Sagnac interferometer with a Dove prism is placed on each arm to separate the different OAM of photons into different output ports, namely, OAM sorters. We demonstrate experimentally the feasibility of OAM sorter by dividing different OAM states into different output ports. Using the cascade interferometers, we also sort the superposition state successfully. Experimental results are in good agreement with the theoretical predictions. Compared with other methods, this method is more stable and can be used to separate superposition states into single photon levels. Furthermore, this method can also be used to couple OAM modes with spatial modes, a very important method for manipulating OAM states. It is a useful method and has potential applications in high-capacity optical communication, quantum entanglement, quantum cryptography, quantum computation and quantum information.