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Physical Review Applied

Dispersion broadening of the two-photon quantum interference width due to temporal filtering

Zhiguang Xia, Xiao Xiang, Runai Quan, Ruifang Dong, Tao Liu, Shougang Zhang

Published Oct 31, 2023• 6 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Temporal filtering is widely recognized as an effective strategy for improving the visibility of the Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometer, an important tool for observing the phenomenon of two-photon quantum interference. However, such manipulation may lead to additional effects on the measurement. In addition to demonstrating the degradation of photon-detection efficiency, this paper demonstrates that temporal filtering can significantly broaden the interference width, especially in scenarios where photons experience substantial dispersion. This broadening effect is also presented in the nonlocal Franson interferometer. The good agreement between experimental results and theoretical simulations not only reveals the mechanism behind dispersion-induced broadening in two-photon quantum interference but also provides an alternative and convenient method for measuring dispersion without the need for extra equipment.

DOI
10.1103/physrevapplied.20.044080

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Temporal filtering is widely recognized as an effective strategy for improving the visibility of the Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometer, an important tool for observing the phenomenon of two-photon quantum interference. However, such manipulation may lead to additional effects on the measurement. In addition to demonstrating the degradation of photon-detection efficiency, this paper demonstrates that temporal filtering can significantly broaden the interference width, especially in scenarios where photons experience substantial dispersion. This broadening effect is also presented in the nonlocal Franson interferometer. The good agreement between experimental results and theoretical simulations not only reveals the mechanism behind dispersion-induced broadening in two-photon quantum interference but also provides an alternative and convenient method for measuring dispersion without the need for extra equipment.
Two-photon interference and Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) effect are relevant tools for quantum metrology and quantum information processing. In optical coherence tomography, the HOM effect is exploited to achieve high-resolution measurements with the width of the HOM dip being the main parameter. On the other hand, applications like dense coding require high-visibility performance. Here we address high-order dispersion effects in two-photon interference and study, theoretically and experimentally, the dependence of the visibility and the width of the HOM dip on both the pump spectrum and the downconverted photon spectrum. In particular, a spatial light modulator is exploited to experimentally introduce and manipulate a custom phase function to simulate the high-order dispersion effects. Overall, we show that it is possible to effectively introduce high-order dispersion effects on the propagation of photons and also to compensate for such effect. Our results clarify the role of the different dispersion phenomena and pave the way for optimization procedures in quantum technological applications involving PDC photons and optical fibers.
We present experimental observations of a nonclassic and nonlocal interference effect with frequency-entangled photon pairs. We observed two-photon interference in a Hong–Ou–Mandel interferometer by monitoring the coincidence-counting rate as we varied the path-length difference or the relative time delay between two photons. The quantum-mechanical probabilities of joint detection by two detectors that respond to different frequency components exhibit differences that depend not only on the arrangement of the detector pairs but on the spectral filtering. The experimental results provide more understanding of two-photon entanglement and of the interference effects that arise from superposition of indistinguishable probability amplitudes.
With propagating through a dispersive medium, the temporal–spectral profile of optical pulses should be inevitably modified. Although such dispersion effect has been well studied in classical optics, its effect on a single-photon wave-packet has not yet been entirely revealed. In this paper, we investigate the effect of dispersion on indistinguishability between single-photon wave-packets through the Hong–Ou–Mandel (HOM) interference. By dispersively manipulating two weak coherent single-photon wave-packets which are prepared by attenuating mode-locked laser pulses before interfering with each other, we observe that the difference of the second-order dispersion between two optical paths of the HOM interferometer can be mapped to the interference curve, indicating that (i) with the same amount of dispersion effect in both paths, the HOM interference curve must be only determined by the intrinsic indistinguishability between the wave-packets, i.e., dispersion cancellation due to the indistinguishability between Feynman paths; and (ii) unbalanced dispersion effect in two paths cannot be canceled and will broaden the interference curve thus providing a way to measure the second-order dispersion coefficient. Our results suggest a more comprehensive understanding of the single-photon wave-packet and pave ways to explore further applications of the HOM interference.
In this paper, we carry out investigation on the HOM interference between two independent photons by using interference filters with different bandwidth both in theory and experiment. Our experimental results are consistent with the theoretical predictions. From the experimental and theoretical results, we find that interference filters with a narrower bandwidth can help to give a larger coherence length, due to the broadening of photon wave-packet in the spatial domain, resulting in an higher interference visibility. Furthermore, a combination of interference filters with different bandwidths may help to achieve a nice balance between coincidence counting rate and interference visibility. Our present work might provide valuable reference for further implementation of HOM interference in the field of quantum information.
We present two-photon interference experiments with polarization-entangled photon pairs in a polarization-based Franson-type interferometer. Although the two photons do not meet at a common beamsplitter, a phase-insensitive Hong-Ou-Mandel type two-photon interference peak and dip fringes are observed, resulting from the two-photon interference effect between two indistinguishable two-photon probability amplitudes leading to a coincidence detection. A spatial quantum beating fringe is also measured for nondegenerate photon pairs in the same interferometer, although the two-photon states have no frequency entanglement. When unentangled polarization-correlated photons are used as an input state, the polarization entanglement is successfully recovered through the interferometer via delayed compensation.
Multiphoton interference effects can be measured with a single detector when two input photons are temporally well separated when compared with the dead time of the single-photon avalanche detector. Here we experimentally demonstrate that the Hong-Ou-Mandel interference effect can be observed with a single non-photon-number resolving detector via a time-delayed coincidence measurement of successive electrical signals from the detector. The two-photon interference experiment is performed by utilizing temporally well-separated pairwise weak coherent pulses, and the interference fringes are successfully measured with high visibility in the range of the limited upper bound for the weak coherent photon source.