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Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics Europe & European Quantum Electronics Conference (CLEO/Europe-EQEC)

Hong-Ou-Mandel Effect Between a Thermal Field and a Heralded Single-Photon State: Improved Visibility by Multiphoton Components

Anahita Khodadad Kashi, Lucia Caspani, Michael Kues

Published Jun 26, 2023• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The heralding technique has been widely deployed as a statistical approach to approximate deterministic single-photon states from the spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) process. As necessary for the two-photon Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) effect, the single frequency mode preparation of heralded single-photon states – which can be achieved by removing frequency correlations – introduces thermal characteristics to the heralded state, whose impact on the HOM visibility has not been explicitly studied so far.

DOI
10.1109/cleo/europe-eqec57999.2023.10231575

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The heralding technique has been widely deployed as a statistical approach to approximate deterministic single-photon states from the spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) process. As necessary for the two-photon Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) effect, the single frequency mode preparation of heralded single-photon states – which can be achieved by removing frequency correlations – introduces thermal characteristics to the heralded state, whose impact on the HOM visibility has not been explicitly studied so far.
The Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) effect is crucial for quantum information processing, and its visibility determines the system's quantum-classical characteristics. In an experimental and theoretical study of the spectral HOM effect between a thermal field and a heralded single-photon state, we demonstrate that the HOM visibility varies dependent on the relative photon statistics of the interacting fields. Our findings reveal that multiphoton components in a heralded state get engaged in quantum interference with a thermal field, resulting in improved visibilities at certain mean photon numbers. We derive a theoretical relationship for the HOM visibility as a function of the mean photon number of the thermal field and the thermal part of the heralded state. We show that the nonclassicality degree of a heralded state is reflected in its HOM visibility with a thermal field; our results establish a lower bound of 41.42% for the peak visibility, indicating the minimum assignable degree of nonclassicality to the heralded state. This research enhances our understanding of the HOM effect and its application to high-speed remote secret key sharing, addressing security concerns due to multiphoton contamination in heralded states.
Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference is a cornerstone of many quantum information processing tasks. It relies on the destructive interference between Feynman paths and provides a measure of photon indistinguishability. For certain applications, e.g. in some quantum secure authentication schemes, the HOM readout needs to be performed remotely, i.e. far away from where the photons were originally created. It is therefore important to understand the effect of dispersion on the two-photon state and consequently its effect on the coincidence probability. Our work focuses on providing measurement data of the effect of polarization mode dispersion (PMD) on the HOM interference for photon pairs produced by spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC).
The frequency degree-of-freedom, being compatible with well-developed omnipresent optical telecommunication infrastructure, allows for stable, controllable and scalable encoding of quantum information [1] . The HOM effect between independent photons, as a central building block to, e.g., quantum key distribution (QKD), quantum teleportation and entanglement swapping, has been mainly employed within the spatial domain [2] . A key element yet missing to enable scalable and thus real-world frequency-based implementation of quantum computation and non-classical communication, is the demonstration of Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference between independently created photons of different frequencies. To date, spectral bosonic HOM interference between single photons, produced out of the same continuous-wave (cw)-excited spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC) process has been demonstrated [3] , which however does not allow scalability due to the spectral impurity inherent to the proposed approach.
Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference is one of the most important experimental phenomena in quantum optics. It has drawn considerable attention with respect to quantum cryptography and quantum communication because of the advent of the measurement device independent (MDI) quantum key distribution (QKD) protocol. Here, we realize HOM interference, having a visibility of approximately 38.1%, using two independent heralded single-photon sources (HSPSs). The HOM interference between two independent HSPSs is a core technology for realizing the long-distance MDI QKD protocol, the quantum coin-tossing protocol, and other quantum cryptography protocols.
A high visibility Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference between two independently prepared photons plays an important role in various photonic quantum information processing. In a standard HOM experiment using photons generated by pulse-pumped spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC), larger detection time windows than the coherence time of photons have been employed for measuring the HOM visibility and/or drawing the HOM dip. If large amounts of stray photons continuously exist within the detection time windows, employing small detection time windows is favorable for reducing the effect of background noises. Especially, such a setup is helpful for the HOM experiment using continuous wave (cw)-pumped SPDC and the time-resolved coincidence measurement. Here we argue that the method for determining the HOM visibility used in the previous cw experiments tends to suffer from distortion arising from biased contribution of the background noises. We then present a new method with unbiased treatment of the cw backgrounds. By using this method, we experimentally demonstrate a high visibility HOM interference of two heralded telecom photons independently generated by SPDC with employing cw pump light. An observed HOM visibility is 0.87 ± 0.04, which is as high as those observed by using pulse-pumped SPDC photons.