Complete temporal characterization of a single photon

Qin, Zhongzhong; Prasad, Adarsh S.; Brannan, Travis; MacRae, Andrew; Lezama, A.; Lvovsky, A. I.

doi:10.1038/lsa.2015.71

Cited by 68 publications

(71 citation statements)

References 26 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Such sources, serving as generators of flying photonic qubits [2], lie at the heart of nearly every quantum-optical technology [3], including photonic logic gates [4], quantum networking [5], and highly nonclassical NOON state generation [6]. Critical to the usefulness of a single-photon source is knowledge of its temporal profile [7][8][9], which has been accomplished via two means: heralding of the emission through a projective measurement on a continuous entangled pair source [10] or on-demand generation through pulsed excitation of a system that releases only one photon per pulse [11]. In this paper, we thoroughly discuss the properties of on-demand pulsed single-photon sources.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamical modeling of pulsed two-photon interference

et al. 2016

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Single-photon sources are at the heart of quantum-optical networks, with their uniquely quantum emission and phenomenon of two-photon interference allowing for the generation and transfer of nonclassical states. Although a few analytical methods have been briefly investigated for describing pulsed single-photon sources, these methods apply only to either perfectly ideal or at least extremely idealized sources. Here, we present the first complete picture of pulsed single-photon sources by elaborating how to numerically and fully characterize non-ideal single-photon sources operating in a pulsed regime. In order to achieve this result, we make the connection between quantum Monte-Carlo simulations, experimental characterizations, and an extended form of the quantum regression theorem. We elaborate on how an ideal pulsed single-photon source is connected to its photocount distribution and its measured degree of second-and first-order optical coherence. By doing so, we provide a description of the relationship between instantaneous source correlations and the typical experimental interferometers (Hanbury-Brown and Twiss, Hong-Ou-Mandel, and Mach-Zehnder) used to characterize such sources. Then, we use these techniques to explore several prototypical quantum systems and their non-ideal behaviors. As an example numerical result, we show that for the most popular single-photon source-a resonantly excited two-level system-its error probability is directly related to its excitation pulse length. We believe that the intuition gained from these representative systems and characters can be used to interpret future results with more complicated source Hamiltonians and behaviors. Finally, we have thoroughly documented our simulation methods with contributions to the Quantum Optics Toolbox in Python in order to make our work easily accessible to other scientists and engineers.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamical modeling of pulsed two-photon interference

et al. 2016

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…It has been demonstrated that this provides a versatile tool to fully characterize the spectral [5] and temporal [6] density matrix of unknown singlephoton states. Further applications are quantum amplifier schemes, [7] suitable for quantum-noise limited amplification of coherent states.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Interference with a quantum dot single-photon source and a laser at telecom wavelength

Felle

Huwer

Stevenson

et al. 2015

Applied Physics Letters

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The interference of photons emitted by dissimilar sources is an essential requirement for a wide range of photonic quantum information applications. Many of these applications are in quantum communications and need to operate at standard telecommunication wavelengths to minimize the impact of photon losses and be compatible with existing infrastructure. Here we demonstrate for the first time the quantum interference of telecom-wavelength photons from an InAs/GaAs quantum dot single-photon source and a laser; an important step towards such applications. The results are in good agreement with a theoretical model, indicating a high degree of indistinguishability for the interfering photons.Single-photon sources are essential components for many photonic quantum information technologies, ranging from linear-optics quantum computation [1] to teleportation of quantum bits [2] and large scale quantum networks.[3] The interference of two independently generated photon states on a beam splitter is an important physical mechanism required for the realization of most of these schemes.Apart from the common implementation with two identical single photons, [4] Of even greater immediate importance are applications related to quantum communication and quantum key distribution [8,9] (QKD), the most developed technology based on photonic quantum bits. The most widely implemented scheme for QKD makes use of weak coherent laser pulses.[10] Interference of these states with single photons from an entangled pair to perform a Bell-state measurement thereby enables quantum teleportation. This * jan.huwer@crl.toshiba.co.uk opens up the route to develop a so-called quantum relay [11] or all-photonic quantum repeater, [12] indispensable to reduce noise and extend the transmission distances in future networks that are strongly limited by photon losses in optical fiber. More generally, recent theoretical studies [13] have shown that, for limited experimental resources, a hybrid approach for the teleportation of continuous variable systems by using discrete single-photon entangled states is expected to have significant advantages over its continuous-variable counterpart. The interference between dissimilar photon sources is thereby of great interest both for fundamental science and a large number of technological applications.Most experiments demonstrated so far have been performed with heralded single photon sources based on non-linear optical processes. [5,6,14] These sources obey Poissonian statistics, intrinsically deteriorating the single-photon character and making them non-desirable for certain applications. More recently, quantum dots (QDs) based on III-V semiconductor compounds have proven to be one of the most promising sub-Poissonian sources, generating deterministic single photons as well as entangled photon pairs. [15][16][17][18] In the past, these systems have been successfully used to demonstrate interference of single photons with emission from a laser [19] and subsequently the teleportation of laser-generated qubits.[20] ...

show abstract

“…To describe the temporal modes of photons, one needs a continuous-variable quantum-state tomography characterizing both the amplitude and the phase functions. Homodyne detection has been proven an efficient probe to characterize photonic (unentangled) Fock and coherent states [5][6][7][8][9][10]. However, most homodyne measurements of bipartite states have only aimed at verifying the entanglement [11][12][13][14][15].…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring the Biphoton Temporal Wave Function with Polarization-Dependent and Time-Resolved Two-Photon Interference

et al. 2015

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We propose and demonstrate an approach to measuring the biphoton temporal wave function with polarization-dependent and time-resolved two-photon interference. Through six sets of two-photon interference measurements projected onto different polarization subspaces, we can reconstruct the amplitude and phase functions of the biphoton temporal waveform. For the first time, we apply this technique to experimentally determine the temporal quantum states of the narrow-band biphotons generated from the spontaneous four-wave mixing in cold atoms. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.010401 PACS numbers: 03.65.Wj, 03.67.Mn, 42.50.Dv Photons are described by their discrete polarization states and field amplitude distribution in continuous time-space domains. The state density matrix in a discrete Hilbert space can be reconstructed using the well-developed quantum-state tomography [1][2][3][4]. To describe the temporal modes of photons, one needs a continuous-variable quantum-state tomography characterizing both the amplitude and the phase functions. Homodyne detection has been proven an efficient probe to characterize photonic (unentangled) Fock and coherent states [5][6][7][8][9][10]. However, most homodyne measurements of bipartite states have only aimed at verifying the entanglement [11][12][13][14][15]. A complete optical homodyne tomography for the time-frequency entangled two-photon (amplitude and phase) temporal waveform still remains a technical challenge [8].There is an increasing interest in fully characterizing narrow-band biphotons because of their applications in realizing efficient light-matter quantum interfaces [16][17][18][19]. Using spontaneous four-wave mixing (SFWM) in cold atoms [20], the sub-MHz biphoton generation with a coherence time on the order of microseconds has been demonstrated [21][22][23]. Such a long coherence time of single photons allows manipulating their temporal waveforms [24][25][26] and their interaction with atoms in the time domain [27][28][29]. Owning to the nanosecond time resolution of commercially available single-photon counting modules (SPCM), the biphoton amplitude temporal profile can be directly measured from the coincidence counts. However, the coincidence counting does not distinguish between a time-frequency entangled state and a temporal-probability mixed state because it does not measure the phase distribution. Although additional evidences, such as the violation of the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality [30] and the antibunching of heralded single photons [31] can indicate the nonclassical properties, they do not provide a complete state information. It is believed that the time-frequency entanglement of biphotons generated from a continuouswave SFWM is naturally endowed by the energy conservation [32], but this claim has not been confirmed experimentally.In this Letter, we propose and implement a technique to measure the temporal wave function of SFWM narrowband biphotons. Using six sets of symmetrized timeresolved two-photon interference measurements in different polarization...

show abstract

Complete temporal characterization of a single photon

Cited by 68 publications

References 26 publications

Dynamical modeling of pulsed two-photon interference

Dynamical modeling of pulsed two-photon interference

Interference with a quantum dot single-photon source and a laser at telecom wavelength

Measuring the Biphoton Temporal Wave Function with Polarization-Dependent and Time-Resolved Two-Photon Interference

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About