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Application of Twin Beams in Mach-Zehnder Interferometer

J. X. Zhang, Chunsong Xie, K. C. Peng

Published Jan 1, 1996• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

Using the twin beams generated from parametric amplifier to drive the two port of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, it is shown that the minimum detectable optical phase shift can be largly reduced to the Heisenberg limit(1/n) which is far below the Shot Noise Limit(1/square root of n) the large gain limit. The dependence of the minimum detectable phase shift on parametric gain and the inefficient photodetectors has been discussed.

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Journal of the Optical Society of Korea•Dec 1, 2005•1 citation
Using the twin beams generated from parametric amplifier to drive the two port of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, it is shown that the minimum detectable optical phase shift can be largly reduced to the Heisenberg limit(1/n) which is far below the Shot Noise Limit(1/square root of n) the large gain limit. The dependence of the minimum detectable phase shift on parametric gain and the inefficient photodetectors has been discussed.
An interferometric detection scheme to measure optical phase shift with sensitivity beyond the shot noise limit is proposed. The theoretical calculation shows that using the quantum correlated twin beams produced from an optical parametric amplifier as the input fields of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, the minimum detectable phase shift will exceed the shot noise limit N-1/2 and approach the Heisenberg limit N-1. The parametric dependences of the minimum detectable phase shift on the nonlinear interaction, input photon number, and detection efficiency are shown.
Abstract A novel scheme for the enhancement of phase sensitivity based on a Mach–Zehnder interferometer (MZI) and intensity detection is proposed. With the input of bright entangled twin beams from four wave mixing (FWM), the phase sensitivity can beat shot noise limit (SNL) and approach Heisenberg limit. This scheme is special due to that only one of bright entangled twin beams enters into the MZI and the other one is employed for measurement. In addition, by altering the parametric strength of FWM and the implementation of maximum quantum squeezing, the optimal phase sensitivity can reach sub-SNL. Optical intensity depletion of photon detectors and internal intensity depletion of the MZI are also discussed. The scheme displays that by employing external resources, while one input of the MZI is an vacuum beam, the phase sensitivity still can beat SNL.
Holland and Burnett [Phys. Rev. Lett. 71, 1355 (1993)] have argued that twin Fock states of equal photon number NNN injected at both input ports of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer lead to phase measurements with accuracies approaching the Heisenberg limit $\ensuremath{\Delta}{\ensuremath{\varphi}}_{\mathrm{HL}}=1/(2N).$ However, the method of phase detection suggested by those authors, obtaining the difference of the photocurrents at the output ports of the interferometer, is not sensitive to the phase difference between the two interferometer paths; in fact, the photocurrent vanishes. In this paper we show that the use of parity measurements on just one of the output modes not only is sensitive to the phase difference but that the sensitivity approaches the Heisenberg limit for large N.N.N.
The phase sensitivity of the coincidence detection in one output port of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer is analysed for twin Fock state inputs. Firstly, the ideal detectors with quantum efficiency of unity are assumed for the detection of the output photons. The sensitivity is found out to be independent of the photon number of input light, which means that the Heisenberg limit cannot be reached in the coincidence detection even with ideal detectors. Secondly, the practical detectors with quantum efficiencies less than unity are discussed.